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Pulling back the curtain on Visual Studio 2013 Doing development ‘The Menlo Way’

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Contents ISSUE 297 • JANUARY 2014

FROM THE EDITORS SPECIAL REPORT 11 Who are they really looking out for? The changing rules of 11 So, what can we expect to see in 2014? configuration 12 SD Times on the Web management NEWS page 53 16 Choosing the right database 18 gives developers a head start on Glass

20 Samsung’s big developer push FEATURES 22 What now for quality assurance? Pulling back the curtain on Visual Studio 2013 26 development the ‘Menlo Way’

29 DevExpress updates .NET development tool COLUMNS 57 CODE WATCH by Larry O’Brien Grading the MOOCs: Incomplete page 36 58 GUEST VIEW by Rebecca Ray Five rules to follow when building software for the world market The Top 10 pitfalls of 60 ANALYST VIEW by Vivian Brown large-scale website Make a win-win deployments 62 INDUSTRY WATCH by David Rubinstein A matter of trust page 49

BUYERS GUIDE 2013: The Year in Review page 30 Choosing the ‘right’ framework page 45

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, and additional offices. SD Times is a registered trademark of BZ Media LLC. All contents © 2014 BZ Media LLC. All rights reserved. The price of a one-year subscription is US$179 for subscribers in the U.S., $189 in Canada, $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]. SDT297 page 6,7_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:12 PM Page 6

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www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 11

FROM THE EDITORS Who are they really looking out for? ack in June, documents leaked by Talk about a delayed reaction. ing more about HealthCare.gov than BEdward Snowden implicated The group’s website and open letter surveillance reform. , Google, Facebook, Yahoo, to Washington demand limits on the In principle, the Reform Govern- AOL and Apple, among other tech government’s authority to collect user ment Surveillance group is coming companies, as participants in PRISM, information, as well as increased over- from the right place. No industry has the most widespread government sur- sight, accountability, transparency, been impacted more profoundly by the veillance program in history. respect for the free flow of information, worldwide backlash against PRISM, Dating as far back as 2007, these and the creation of an inter-govern- and their economic clout gives the tech companies granted the NSA access to mental framework for data requests. giants a loud voice in Washington. But every form of electronic communication That all sounds great, but what are whether or not these companies are in their arsenals—e-mails, video and the companies actually doing about it? truly out to effect fundamental change, voice chats, social networking informa- The letter’s only mentions of tangi- it’ll take far more than sweeping tion, and stored personal data, to name a ble action are vague assertions of demands and public handholding. few. One leaked document went as far as “deploying the latest encryption tech- Plus, waiting until now to publicly to say that “98% of PRISM production is nology” and “pushing back on govern- crusade against government surveil- based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.” ment requests.” As for calling on the lance practices makes Google, Face- Now, more than six months later, government to endorse these principles book, Apple and the like seem as if those six companies have banded togeth- and enact reform, a sit-down at the they’re just trying to save face to their er with Twitter and LinkedIn to form the White House with President Obama users, whose data remains as subject to Reform Government Surveillance group. and top tech executives was spent talk- scrutiny as it ever was. z So, what can we expect to see in 2014? t’s fairly clear to anyone in the software applications and cloud-based hosting. with usefulness we’ve seen up to now. Idevelopment industry that the reces- Big Data, for example, appeals to the Expect mobile to begin replacing desk- sion is over. Sure, mainstream and Main suits upstairs because it can help them tops in 2014, perhaps even by allowing Street America are still hurting, college is optimize their bottom lines. Expect users to plug in a keyboard and monitor still too expensive, and unemployment Hadoop and its ecosystem to continue to their phones. remains high. But in Silicon Valley and their massive growth in 2014. Meanwhile, at Microsoft, Steve the software development world in gen- Cloud developers, on the other Ballmer will be stepping aside as CEO, eral, money is flowing freely, software is hand, are pushing agile to its absolute leaving pundits to speculate if the next advancing quickly, and new paradigms limits, thanks to the ability to revise man in charge will be able to breathe are coming into focus for enterprises. applications and have them back up life into the company’s phone and tablet This is all quite odd, as the computer and running in minutes. This velocity efforts while keeping the enterprise hardware industry itself is almost on the will only increase in 2014 when Dock- plays going. Perhaps it’s time to think ropes. There’s Dell going private, Oracle er.io brings Linux Containers into the about spinning off divisions into wholly taking a beating on Wall Street, and solid mainstream. Containers allow for even owned subsidiaries, so resources can be state drive makers fighting to the death faster deployment, on the order of sec- focused and the revolving doors into over who gets acquired before the mon- onds, meaning there will be even fewer and out of the various business units ey runs out. It’s an odd position to be in. restraints on agility. can finally stop. What does all of this mean for 2014? Mobile developers, however, will In all, 2014 should be a year where It means that enterprise software continue to run into the brick wall of developers gain influence, software developers are going to be contributing almost infinite competition in 2014. takes over an even larger portion of the a lot more to the bottom lines of their App stores will only get larger and more world, and Big Data merges with cloud businesses. difficult to navigate both as a user and and mobile to learn about all of our That’s because software develop- as a seller. 2014 should be the year lives and habits, whether we want it to ment is only becoming more important when we start to see some killer apps or not. Expect privacy to vanish a little thanks to things like Big Data, mobile for businesses, rather than the flirting bit more in 2014. z SDT297 page 12,13_Layout 1 12/20/13 1:17 PM Page 12

12 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com

The Google Play Store’s thief-ware problem Bitdefender Antivirus Software recently posted a survey that said that 1.2% of apps in the Google Play Store were repack- aged thief-ware (that is, an app that has more than 90% of its code copied from another app). These apps were built to rip off the creators of the ones they copied, explained Rob Marvin: “In most cases, the 2,140 copycat developers that were found reassembled the Where are the women apps almost identically, adding new advertising SDKs to siphon profits in software development? away from the original developers.” You can read more at sdt.bz/66393. We’ve covered this before: The seem- ingly never-ending lament that women are underrepresented in software SD Times’ Top 10 viewed stories of 2013 development. But now we have an idea Online readers found these stories to be the most interesting and important: about just how underrepresented they are. According to a study 1. Users poke around OS X ‘Mavericks’ by Tracy Chou, women 2. The SD Times 100: ‘Best in Show’ make up approximately... in Software Development 12% of the workforce. “We’ve all set up our 3. Researchers successfully reverse-engineer Dropbox booths at the Grace Hop- 4. Top 5 weekly projects trending on GitHub per career fair and we’re all trying to recruit the 5. Samsung buying off StackOverflow users for publicity same talented young 6. How to roll back to iOS 5 (if necessary)... women, but really, there’s a bigger goal: to remove 7. Google goes back to its roots for 15th anniversary, unveils a slew of updates gender as the hidden (or sometimes 8. Scrum means being incremental not-so-hidden) discriminant in the tech industry,” she wrote on her blog. You 9. Adobe breach compromised more than 38 million users, Photoshop source code can read more about her study at 10. HTML5 apps as good as native apps when it comes to mobile development sdt.bz/66424.

FEEDBACK ily, and you can’t do anything.’ Not the kind of support you’re looking for “I’m trying to track this com- Recently a report circulated that someone is calling Microsoft pany down, and the sad part is, calling my phone company, customers posing as Microsoft support agents. Naturally, Verizon, was no help. They gave me the runaround, and in these calls are attempts at scamming users. In our blog effect said that they can't help me. on the subject (available at sdt.bz/66400), a reader I don’t know where to proceed next. shared his own horror story: “I’m sure when we get home, the same Indian “My house has been receiving the same Microsoft company will call back saying the call is coming scam calls from a telephone with no caller ID. In each from ‘Microsoft.’ Sometimes the caller is female. case, the caller was a male with a heavy Indian accent. In most cases, the caller is male, and in all cases, Yesterday, my wife answered the phone, and she said they are downright nasty. I’m sure that they politely not to call again, and to take us off his list. get through and end up successfully scam- The person didn’t care and was really nasty and pro- ming a small percentage of their calls. Since fane. He threatened my wife, and when I got on, they’re calling from a foreign country, he was belligerent and continued to threaten me whatever information or money they and my family. This telemarketer was laughing, extract from their victims may not even be saying ‘What can you do? I can say anything to illegal in their homeland.” you, your wife, your kids, and the rest of your fam- Alex G. SDT297 page 12,13_Layout 1 12/20/13 1:06 PM Page 13

www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 13

Ten tips for better app performance Christina Mulligan recently spoke with SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos, and he brought with him 10 tips for making your apps work as best as they can. A sampling: “If your organization lacks performance-centric culture, all the testing in the world won’t make a difference to your application. Better to plan, develop and release a high-performing by emphasizing the importance of performance in all areas of your company.” You can read the other tips at sdt.bz/66436. Octocat, © 2013 GitHub, Inc. GitHub, © 2013 Octocat, The Top 5 GitHub projects from December The world’s largest project repository allows you to see what the most popular projects are. Here’s what saw the most action in December: 1) How to Make a Computer 2) SpinKit 3) Headroom.js 4) Websocketd 5) jQuery.Adaptive-Background.js

The Google/Oracle patent war just got hot again The battle over Google’s alleged use of Oracle , once thought to be dormant, is now on Manu Cornet (www.bonkersworld.net) Manu Cornet again after Oracle appealed a previous decision in Google’s favor. This legal fight is also pitting interests like Microsoft and Rackspace against each other. How MIT’s newest gadget can see big a deal is this fight? “If the previous ruling is overturned, Google could owe Oracle more than you, in this room or the next US$1 billion in damages, but the From the Rockwell references department: MIT appeals court is not expected to researchers have come up with a device that can detect make its decision for another human motion, even through walls and other obstacles. several months,” reports Dubbed WiTrack, the device uses previously researched Christina Mulligan. You can WiFi technology to do this. The read more about this ongoing researchers also came up with a hypothet- story at sdt.bz/66453. ical use case for it: “In order to monitor the elderly, they are required to wear sen- sors, which, in cases of dementia, can be What did we learn? forgotten to be worn. With WiTrack, no Computer Science Education Week, which ran from Dec. 9-15, ended sensors or cameras are required, and it can detect a fall with more than 15.9 million students with a very high degree of accuracy,” reports Christina completing an Hour of Code, writing Mulligan. You can read more about the technology over 524 million lines of code. behind the device and where it’ll make its debut at School districts in New York, Illinois, sdt.bz/67488. Alabama, Wisconsin and Maryland also added new computer science SD Times wants classes to their curriculum. Read to hear from you. more about CSEW at sdt.bz/67485. Join us on LinkedIn and Facebook. SDT297 Full page ads 2-37_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:02 PM Page 14 SDT297 Full page ads 2-37_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:02 PM Page 15 SDT297 page 16,17_Layout 1 12/23/13 12:17 PM Page 16

16 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Choosing the right database: What factors determine what’s best for your applications? BY DENISH PATEL Oracle, MySQL (also Oracle), SQL larger user base and a longer time peri- Our world is awash in digital data. Con- Server (Microsoft) and DB2 (IBM). od to identify and remedy inherent tinuous advances in storage technologies, NoSQL: These databases provide a issues and strengthen support. Unless data-collection methods and processing solution for handling data that is less newly offered features are essential for power enable our businesses to capture, structured than relational databases. the business solution, a more mature aggregate and analyze information from Trading query processing flexibility for offering is usually the best. an ever-greater spectrum of sources. The scalability and performance under differ- opportunities are endless, but with these ent workloads, these databases focus on Operations and management opportunities come daunting challenges. data storage and are optimized for The cost of maintaining and operating a On one hand, the options for assem- retrieval and appending operations. database over its life often bling the ideal solution for a given data These make NoSQL databases attractive exceeds its acquisi- application have never been better; on for cloud deployment and Big Data tion costs. Depend- the other hand, choosing the right com- applications. Popular NoSQL database ing on its data center ponents for that solution is ever more examples (all open source) include Mon- environment and the confusing and complex. goDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, Riak, When collecting requirements, con- Hadoop, Redis and Neo4j. centrate on what is needed over how the Platform support: All databases do needs will be addressed. Focusing on not operate on all available platforms. the needs rather than creating require- Desktop (OS X and Windows), mobile ments for a specific implementation (Android, iOS), enterprise (BSD, Illu- opens the door for more optimal meth- mos/OpenSolaris, Linux), and cloud ods. With more than 200 choices avail- (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Joyent, Rack- able, it’s likely that you’ll be able to find space) operating platforms each have one or more databases that are a good fit their own nuances and constraints that for your needs. Consider the following affect database cost, capacity and per- attributes when comparing databases. formance. Even when a given database covers multiple platforms, it may sup- Type of database port some better than others. From relational database management Licensing terms: How a database is systems (RDBMS) through specialized licensed can impact its cost, risk profile graphics, object and columnar databas- and usage flexibility. Commercially avail- es, many types of databases have able databases charge licensing and evolved to meet a wide range of com- maintenance costs for regular releases mon and specialized applications. For and stronger support, but can be costly to most applications, the two most impor- scale, restrictive in usage, and require tant categories are: vendor resources if modifications or SQL RDBMS: Relational databases, extensions are required. An increasing the most widely used model, maintain number of databases are being offered size, skill sets and strategy for its inter- data in a set of separate, related files through open-source licensing. This nal IT organization, a company can (tables), and combine elements from model cuts licensing costs and usage choose to implement and support a these files when needed for queries and restrictions, but requires a greater invest- database with its own staff, or use one reports. Designed primarily to handle ment in internal and/or external support. of many available sourcing options. Any structured data, these databases are Maturity: With new databases aspect of the database’s selection, heavily used for workhorse business reaching the market on a frequent basis, implementation, application software applications in areas such as finance, it is tempting to try the latest and great- development, support and operations manufacturing and human resources, est to get the newest features. Unfortu- can be sourced to external consultants. which use SQL queries to access data nately, these databases often have more Likewise, the database can be hosted maintained in standard record formats. defects, security vulnerabilities and per- by an external provider. Some hosting Popular SQL RDBMS examples formance and stability issues than more- services include regular database backup include PostgreSQL (open source), mature offerings. Maturity provides a and maintenance, as well as disaster SDT297 page 16,17_Layout 1 12/23/13 12:18 PM Page 17

www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 17 Understanding your options recovery services. Cloud deployment is a help to avoid, detect and repair hard- Extensibility: Does the database variation of external hosting where the ware- and software-driven data faults. support simple ways of adding function- database operates on a cloud-computing Availability: Availability measures ality? Does your company have access to platform offered by Amazon EC2, whether a database is available for use the source code, the skills and ability to GoGrid, Rackspace or other providers. when needed. A database designed for make modifications? Does the database In this model, companies can use a virtu- high availability would disable a malfunc- have interfaces to support externally al machine image to operate their data- tioning component and continue operat- developed functionality, or can it take bases independently, or they can simply ing at a reduced capacity, as opposed to a advantage of the capabilities of other purchase access to a database service less capable system that might crash and software applications? For example, an delivered by the provider. become totally non-operational. otherwise ideal database may not support Resiliency: This factor assesses a the data encryption your company needs, Operational attributes database’s ability to recover from faults but if it can be run using an encrypted Databases differ considerably such as hardware crashes, overloads file system, the combination becomes a in the robustness of their and software component failures. Sim- viable solution. operational attributes. ple databases may require restoration Knowledge and staffing: Is the new Attributes such as superfast from backup files after a failure, where- database familiar to your internal IT performance and high avail- as a more advanced database may staff? If not, it will require an investment ability come at a price in employ sophisticated replication, roll- for training or the hiring of external terms of software, hardware back and component isolation strate- resources. For example, while many and support overhead. The gies to minimize the impact of faults. enterprise know how to true requirements of the Security: Databases offer differing code effective SQL queries, far fewer business functions being sup- levels of security features to protect the would be able to write Map/Reduce jobs ported are the key for finding database from vulnerabilities like unau- for Riak. Likewise, the market availabili- the most effective balance thorized access or disclosure of person- ty of experts is far greater for widely used between these attributes and al or proprietary data. The level of secu- databases such as Postgres and Hadoop. their cost. rity protection required for a given Community: Open-source offerings, Performance: Database database application depends on the such as PostgreSQL, have active and performance is judged by fac- confidentiality/value of the data it con- robust user communities that provide tors such as response time per tains and its level of accessibility to support, and they make getting use cases query and transaction through- unauthorized activities. and product extensions easier. In con- put, and is affected by the design of the Data integrity: A database’s data trast, gaining the same level of assistance database, infrastructure capacity, and integrity features enable the specifica- for closed-source offerings such as Ora- the logical and physical structure of the tion and enforcement of rules to pro- cle and Vertica requires expensive con- data. For example, using a schema tect the quality of the data it stores. tracting for proprietary resources. imposes more structure on the underly- These rules may include checks and Successfully implementing a new ing data but provides better perform- corrections for invalid data upon entry, database involves considerations well ance due to the constraints. restrictions on data relationships, and beyond the selection of the database Scalability: Scalability evaluates the timeframes for data retention. itself. If your company doesn’t already ability of a database to handle anticipat- Ease of implementation: Choos- have the right expertise in house, ed growth in usage, transaction rates and ing the database with the best features engaging specialized consulting assis- data volume. Considerations include will not necessarily guarantee a success- tance can be highly valuable. By bring- inherent product limitations, ease of ful implementation. The availability of ing market knowledge and first-hand increasing capacity by adding hardware, tools, staffing and support for a widely experience of the many available data- and costs for additional licenses and used database can trump the technical base solutions, consultants can reduce hardware to handle expected growth. advantages of a less common offering. the time, resources and costs of choos- Reliability: Reliability is a measure Availability of tools: A mature, ing, implementing, operating and man- of the ability of a system to function widely used database will be supported aging your database solution. z correctly—including avoiding data loss by a variety of open-source and commer- and corruption—over a given time peri- cial tools to assist with software develop- Denish Patel is the lead od. It is often assessed using Mean ment, integration with other products, database architect at Time Between Failure, and is backup and recovery, and other critical OmniTI, a global IT enhanced by database features that functions. services company. SDT297 page 18_Layout 1 12/20/13 2:00 PM Page 18

18 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Google gives developers a head start BY ROB MARVIN app scrolls through real-time distance, Google Glass is inching closer and closer speed and time information, only noti- to consumer release, and developers fying and displaying the tracking details have started to see development tools for the user immediately needs. Glassware (Google’s term for applica- tions that run on the device itself) and A rose-tinted future the greater availability of the Glass itself. “Glass is a really different platform,” In November alone, Google gave a Jordan said. “On Glass you don’t think sneak peek of the Glass Development about screen size; it’s a completely dif- Kit (GDK), released a widely available ferent interface. There’s no keyboard, Mirror API, and expanded the Glass it’s all about voice. It’s a more natural Explorer program with more devices way to compute, but it’s still new. for developer purchase. “Think about the keyboard. The “The GDK and Mirror API are two design we still use today is based on pillars of the same platform,” said Tim- keyboard mapping for typists to slow othy Jordan, senior developer advocate and it gives access to deeper levels of them down. I’m interested in typing for Google Glass. “The Mirror API the Glass hardware, such as the built-in faster and protecting my wrists, which makes easy things easier, and the GDK GPS. would be an incremental upgrade, a 1x. makes hard things possible.” The GDK also comes with a feature Commanding the computer with your Jordan explained that the Mirror called “live cards,” which are situated on voice? That’s a 10x improvement.” API is a RESTful API that developers the left side of the Glass home screen Ultimately, Jordan sees Glass as a can get up and running with a proto- and continually update in real time. Plus, monumental step toward effortless tech- type in an hour or two. For developers by allowing high-level access to the voice nology, in the vein of one of his favorite without a Glass device, the Web-based menu, developers can add “OK Glass” T.V. show, “Star Trek: Enterprise.” API is best for building Glassware that vocal commands to control the app. “All they had to do was ask what they manage displayed content, create “The live cards act like a moment in wanted done,” he said. “It would set up, actions to interact with menu items, or time; they fade away on the timeline,” say, 10 tasks at a time and the comput- set up notifications. Jordan explained. “Users often only ing would happen in this ubiquitous, The GDK, on the other hand, has need to pay attention to recent items.” natural way. Glass is a pioneer in that three main factors that differentiate it Jordan used a Glass app, Strava, to way of thinking, the first step toward from the Mirror API: It can run offline; illustrate the potential of live cards. introducing effortless technology into developers can deploy apps and Strava is a real-time jogging and bike- our lives without ever having to read a respond to user feedback in real time; riding app. If a rider is using Glass, the manual.” z

Jordan said. “You need to rethink what you’re building. A tablet Five lessons from the Explorer Program interface is supposed to be immersive, engaging, but the Glass Senior developer advocate for Google Glass Timothy Jordan interface is a micro-interaction, a more natural user experience.” and the development team have been working on Glass for n Don’t get in the way: “Developers need to focus on the true years. Through the experiences of Glass explorers and the experience,” Jordan said. “Glassware is supposed to be there changes the product has undergone during the development when the users want it, and it should go away when they don’t.” process, they’ve learned a great deal about Glass, and how users n Keep it relevant: “It’s about context,” Jordan said. “At a gro- and developers should interact with it. cery store, the user’s shopping list should come up. Keep space “On top of getting users using Glass, we want developers and time in mind. What’s happening where the Glass user is building for it early and often,” Jordan said. “Feedback makes right now? What do they need?” Glass better, so we’ve tried to let developers use it right away n Unexpected = unpleasant: “We’ve found that too much infor- and contribute to the evolution of the project.” mation surprises users,” Jordan said. “They expect to get just Jordan made a point of mentioning that the majority of the what they need, so don’t overload them with way too much con- GDK is stock Android code, with the modifications and Glass- tent, say, while they’re sleeping.” specific features available in a library, so Android developers n Build for people: “What if aliens came to earth after humans can make a natural transition to creating Glassware. are gone and saw computers? What would they think we looked Out of everything they’ve learned, Jordan found five princi- like?” Jordan mused. “You look at a hammer, it makes sense. ples to communicate to developers to help them make the most You understand how it works. Glass has that quality. It fits peo- of Glassware: ple’s lives in a more natural, not distant way. It’s all about mak- n Glass is different: “You have to really rethink design for Glass,” ing daily life fundamentally easier.” z SDT297 Full page ads 2-37_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:03 PM Page 19 SDT297 page 20_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:35 PM Page 20

20 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Samsung’s big developer push Company realizes apps will shape “how we work and play”

BY ROB MARVIN Pulling away from Android like the Samsung Strategy Innovation Propelling continued OS and app inno- It’s no secret that Samsung doesn’t like Center (SSIC) in Menlo Park, Calif., and vation while sustaining cross-platform relying on Google’s Android OS. An the Media Solutions Center America in relevance doesn’t happen without a important facet of the company’s devel- San Jose. The SSIC marks the first time strong developer program. Treat devel- oper push is stressing that Android apps the company has moved substantial opers right, and they’ll increase cus- are created solely for its own devices, R&D operations out of South Korea. tomer loyalty, become viral marketers contrasted against the benefits of devel- There is one other, largely quiet of a company’s brand, and make them- oping for the Galaxy suite as opposed to front on which Samsung is trying to selves and the platform they develop on Google and Nexus devices. break away from Android: OS. lots and lots of money. Before Samsung DevCon, the com- The open-source operating system Samsung is keenly aware of how cru- pany outright encouraged developers to developed by and Samsung has hit cial a role developers will play in the create apps that are “more than just delay after delay in terms of rolling out future of its Galaxy devices, as well as Android.” When asked about the advan- on Samsung devices, but its underlying its vision for converging its TVs, tablets tages of Android development on presence is strong. and in a complete living- Galaxy devices instead of Nexus, Sasaki Sasaki declined to comment on how room experience for the user. Over the pointed to apps such as eBay, MyFit- Tizen fits into Samsung’s future soft- past several months, the company has debuted a lineup of new SDKs, touted the Samsung Developer Program, and SDKs for the living room organized the first annual Samsung Samsung DevCon saw these SDKs pitched to consumer-device-focused developers: DevCon in San Francisco. n Updated Samsung Mobile SDK: The n Samsung Multiscreen Gaming SDK: A “We believe that the next big innova- SDK now combines 10 individual pack- joint creation made by Samsung and Uni- tions, the ones that permanently and ages—including the latest S Pen, Media ty Technologies. It’s a gaming engine positively alter how we work and play, Control, Professional Audio and Gesture— built on top of the Samsung Multiscreen will be largely shaped by developers,” into a single integrated SDK for easier SDK allowing game developers to create said Curtis Sasaki, Samsung senior vice overall development. immersive multiscreen gaming experi- n president and head of its Media Solu- Samsung Smart TV 5.0 Beta SDK: Lets ences for any TV using a Samsung tions Center of America. “We are creat- developers and content partners create or tablet as a console. applications for Samsung’s 2014 Smart n Samsung KNOX SDK: Provides security ing new and better SDKs and tools for TVs. The SDK also now supports Smart and management enhancements, includ- developers, and providing the technical Home for home appliance convergence. ing application container technology. support developers need to create the n Samsung Multiscreen SDK: An open Developers now have the ability to devel- best apps.” platform that allows developers to create op enterprise solutions that enable One of the drivers behind Samsung applications and services that can span enterprises to support Bring-Your-Own- DevCon, according to Sasaki, was the multiple screens with highly intuitive Device without compromising either cor- ability to plug the possibilities of multi- experiences. porate security or employee privacy. screen development. “The timing turned out to be ideal as nessPal, Snapchat and RunKeeper ware plans, but talk of quiet Tizen there were several new SDKs coming already present on the Galaxy Gear pitches to Android developers echoed together around the same time,” he said. smartwatch. throughout Samsung DevCon. “We had just come off the release of the On top of multiscreen opportunities, Samsung has made its developer new Galaxy Note 3 smartphone and Samsung is making a point of showing intentions quite clear. The SDKs, the Galaxy Gear [smart watch], and we were how much it’s willing to cater to devel- developer conference and programs, and hearing interest from developers.” opers with its developer program and the in-app revenues are all part of an A smaller Samsung Developer Day, in-app revenue distribution. The com- uphill battle to create more apps tailored in London last November, followed as pany has committed to giving develop- to the unique features of its devices. Samsung extended its efforts globally to ers 80% of in-app purchase revenues, “Developers are motivated by inno- attract developers. m“We wanted to up from the previous 70% share, vation and creating applications and hear from developers and get feedback, through April 30, 2014. services that change peoples lives,” input and ideas so that we are always Sasaki also talked up the in-person Sasaki said. “Our ultimate goal is to cre- improving the way we work with them,” service and support Samsung is offering ate experiences that open doors to new Sasaki said. developers at its “innovation centers,” ideas.” z SDT297 Full page ads 2-37_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:03 PM Page 21 SDT297 page 22_Layout 1 12/20/13 1:04 PM Page 22

22 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com What now for quality assurance? Three trends that are making traditional methods obsolete BY CHRISTINA MULLIGAN “It is very critical that those two the need for mobile test automation to Over time, programming languages have teams are in constant communication in be not so great a few years ago due to the developed, technology has changed, the terms of their tools, collaborating and complexity of the application and overall process of developing software has trans- then seeing what’s happening in real immaturity of the knowledge out there in formed, and the types of applications time, because one little miscommunica- the market,” said Roboostoff. “Now, we created have evolved. Is quality assur- tion or misstep can have tremendous are starting to see a lot of things changing ance (QA) testing next to change? ripple effects downstream,” he said. that makes mobile test automation a lot According to Archie Roboostoff, 2. More attention is paid to per- more important in the organizations.” director of the Borland testing portfolio formance: Typically, performance has The need to constantly automate for Micro Focus, it is. He outlines three also been a part of the quality assurance those tests and run regression testing is trends changing the way QA testing is team’s job, but it usually is not done necessary, just as it is with desktop and being executed: until all functional issues and coding are Web applications, he said. 1. Quality testing teams and taken care of, according to Roboostoff. Also, developers are starting to development teams are becoming But now, “We are seeing customers use embrace more hybrid applications, said more aligned: The current (but chang- performance testing to sort of track the Roboostoff. This saves a lot of work for ing) practice is to leave QA testing to performance trend of their application developers, but the problem is the bur- the end of the development process. as it progresses through the develop- den now lies on the QA team. But that luxury of time no longer exists ment cycle,” he said. “You are starting to see a real need to for software companies, according to By keeping track of an application’s do very strong mobile and mobile Web Roboostoff. QA and development performance trends, developers will be test automation,” he said. “Where cus- teams are starting to become more able to easily tell when and why some- tomers had the luxury of being able to aligned, and in some cases becoming thing becomes sluggish. ignore that a few years ago, now we are the same team. 3. All things mobile: “We’ve seen starting to see a real need.” z SDT297 Full page ads 2-37_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:03 PM Page 23 SDT297 page 24,25_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:39 PM Page 24 Become a Big Data Master!

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26 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Software development the ‘Menlo Way’ No, it’s not a cult. It’s a combination of development best practices, humorous irreverence, and common sense

BY ALYSON BEHR enlo Innovations is a privately held development firm that has gar- Mnered numerous awards as a result of its unique approach to design- ing, programming and delivering software projects; its unusual workplace; and its unfailing mission to spread joy among its employees and customers. Richard Sheridan, Menlo Innovations’ founder and CEO, is an ener- getic entrepreneur who began writing code “professionally” before he could drive. He scored a full-time salaried position right out of high school, Richard Sheridan, and while living at home with nothing else to spend his money on, decided founder and CEO, to rekindle a deep childhood interest in aviation. He got his pilot license by Menlo Innovations the time he was 19. This “see and conquer” side to him led him to challenge the status quo when it came to forming his own development firm.

SD TIMES: Why did you model Menlo Inno- and evocative of Menlo directly as determined to find a new way of doing vations after Thomas Edison’s “Invention opposed to trying to bring a message things than was customary. I remember Factory”? about culture. talking to programmers who after 10 Richard Sheridan: I visited what was The first time I typed a line of code years of their career had never seen a essentially the recreation of the Menlo was in 1971. I was in high school. I typed project they worked on ship or see the Park, N.J. lab of Thomas Edison as a in a two-line program, typed “Run” on a light of day. That’s sad, because too kid. It gave me goosebumps when I teletype hooked to a timesharing mini- often these projects were created with- was 8 years old to think how this little computer, and this teletype typed back in death march cultures: programmers energized room of a great team “Hi Rich,” because that’s what I told it to working 60-80 hours a week, jettisoning changed the world. I may not have do. I was hooked. I knew what I wanted time with family and friends. One day been thinking about that when I was 8, to do for the rest of my days. I saw code the boss comes in and says “Oh, by the but there was something electrifying as the ultimate, sculptable material. way, this project’s canceled.” about the atmosphere, and the goose- As I rose through the ranks in soft- I wanted a different result. It was a bumps stuck with me. ware development, I realized I was personally selfish journey. Ultimately, I Later, when I entered the work dying inside. I was convinced that I ended up defining the mission as one world, I became very quickly disillu- wasn’t cut out for this profession, and I defined by joy. The joy of knowing that sioned because the career I thought I thought it was just me. what we create gets out into the world was going to have in software wasn’t Then I started looking around and and ends up being widely adopted and happening. I began recalling those realized our whole industry was broken. enjoyed. childhood memories and realized that The Standish Group’s Chaos Report How do other widely accepted develop- was what I wanted to get back to. measures failures of our industry annu- ment practices such as agile and lean You recently released a new book. Tell me ally. Most projects never see the light of development differ from the “Menlo Way” about “Joy, Inc.,” your latest effort. What day. If they do, they don’t work right. If practice you have developed? initially inspired you to write books? they work right, no one ever uses them. We borrow from many sources. We use “Joy, Inc.” is my first substantial book. I didn’t want to be stuck in a career practices from the Project Management The others were more team-oriented where people hate what I do, so I was Institute, lean, Six Sigma, agile and SDT297 page 26,27_Layout 1 12/23/13 12:56 PM Page 27

www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 27

Scrum. We’ve knitted together an end- and at what point in the project do the cally skilled you are. This is not the land to-end system that influences how we designers get involved? of individual heroes. interview, hire, report status to our cus- We have a set of people on our team Because we care about teamwork, tomers and run meetings. Many times, called “high-tech anthropologists.” our hiring process is different. We never the reason we use standard words is That’s our registered trademark for our ask any questions other than whether a because we don’t conform to a lot of user experience designers. Every project candidate is 18 and legal to work in the them. Dr. Jeff Liker, author of “The starts with them. The first three weeks to U.S. We mass-interview up to 50 people Toyota Way,” once said that “Any single three months of any software project will at a time, pairing candidates and putting piece you find at Menlo, you will find start with high-tech anthropology. them to work with another developer. elsewhere. What you won’t find else- We might do a couple of technical They are given explicit instructions, and where is all the pieces working together spikes along the way to eliminate some the candidate’s job is to make their part- in a system.” We never studied lean, but risk around some bizarre technical ner look good. If they struggle, help the lean world found us and began requirement, but ultimately it is our them out. Make them feel at home so describing back to us why we are lean. high-tech anthropologists who drive the they can get some work done. The table full of story cards in the video projects. They are the ones going out into At the end of the day, candidates are (“Menlo Code for Joy,” available on the world studying users as anthropolo- evaluated based on their ability to act like YouTube at bit.ly/IKBIp0) looks pretty gists do, learning their world, their a Menlonian. Some will be asked back daunting. How does the team break it into vocabulary, learning their goals as human for a second interview. We actually bring meaningful order and prioritize? beings and bringing this intelligence them in for a paid, contracted, live eight- Our customers prioritize the story cards. back to infuse into pixel-perfect screen hour working day, and they are paired Each card describes a feature they want designs. with two people for a half-day. It works added to their project. They review How do you hire people and what do you for us because we have a chance to see each card, which contains costs and oth- look for in a candidate’s style? how our potential hire works in a live er factors. The cards are of different The No. 1 skill we prize is whether or production environment, and it works for sizes because we fold them to the size of not our developers have good kinder- the candidate because they have a the estimate. The customer places them garten skills. Whether they play well chance to see if an open factory floor, by priority on the planning sheets. with others. If you don’t have these crazy creative, talkative environment is How big a role does design play in the UI, qualities, it doesn’t matter how techni- one they’ll flourish in. z Do Not Just Go with Any Tool! Go with the Best Tool Winner of ϳ͘ϬϬ Gold Rommana ALM Team is Free RM Tool ϲ͘ϬϬ Award

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COMPONENT WATCH DevExpress updates .NET development tool Touch support, enhanced mobile app framework highlight latest release BY CHRISTINA MULLIGAN entire Visual Studio product line.” DevExtreme, the company’s mobile DevExpress recently released DevEx- The release features built-in touch/ app framework, now comes with a press Universal 13.2, an updated ver- gesture support and touch-friendly touch-optimized user experience, sion of its integrated .NET software application themes, allowing develop- straightforward page navigation, native- development tool set. This was the sec- ers to create modern UI applications ly rendered widgets, view management, ond major release of 2013. With without abandoning WinForms or data access layers and a single page extended enterprise-ready capabilities, WPF platforms. application framework that allows features and tools, developers can build Universal 13.2 also comes equipped developers to create Android, iOS, next-generation user experiences on with enterprise analytics, dashboards Tizen and Windows Phone applications the platform of their choice. and reporting tools to provide applica- using HTML5. The eXpressApp frame- “At DevExpress, we remain focused tion development feedback. work allows developers to build busi- on the needs of .NET developers tar- The updated CodeRush plug-in for ness applications targeting Windows geting the WinForms, Windows Pres- Visual Studio provides development and the Web with a single codebase. entation Foundation, ASP.NET, teams with a debugging experience that Other features include Visual Studio HTML5 and Windows 8 platforms,” presents users with the ability to find dashboard integration, a new PDF doc- said Julian Bucknall, CTO of DevEx- duplicate code and consolidate it. ument processor, map control improve- press. “This release includes numerous The release adds enhancements to ments, and spreadsheet controls for new tools and key updates across our its mobile and application frameworks. WPF and ASP.NET WebForms. z Nevron unveils cross-platform In other component news… ■ Dynamsoft, a developer of scanner programming libraries and JavaScript UI widget for .NET developers webcam plug-ins, has released the lat- est version of its Dynamic .NET TWAIN BY CHRISTINA MULLIGAN bilities to cross-platform applications. software development kit. Dynamic After being under development for NOV not only works for developers, .NET TWAIN 5.0 now provides built-in almost five years, Nevron, a .NET but also project managers, component support for Windows Presentation component provider, announced the vendors and independent software ven- Foundation, allowing developers to availability of Nevron Open Vision dors, according to Ivo Milanov, CTO of build WPF-based applications for image (NOV) 2013.1, a cross-platform pres- Nevron. capturing from TWAIN scanners or entation layer designed for .NET “Project managers can now lower UVC/WIA webcams and other devices. developers. development costs, go to market faster ■ Microsoft component solution The first version of NOV introduces and increase the customer base by provider ComponentOne (a division of user interface widgets aimed at elimi- delivering enterprise-ready cross-plat- GrapeCity) has released the latest ver- nating the need for any platform-specif- form solutions from a single codebase,” sion of Studio Enterprise 2013, an ic controls. NOV widgets currently he said. “Component Vendors and ISVs updated suite of data and UI controls include buttons, color pickers, com- can now concentrate on the products for Visual Studio developers. The v3 mand bars, containers, context popups, they make, and forget about the efforts release features the addition of them- drop-down edits, panels, range-based needed to release one and the same ing in WinForms and ASP.NET Wijmo. widgets, tree view, list box, NOV win- product on multiple platforms and ■ Word-processing component provider dows, and text widgets. environments.” TX Text Control has released version X10 The release also provides a rich text The release includes integration of TX Text Control, its word-processing editor, aiming to give developers an support for Windows Form, Windows component suite. The release includes advanced text and document processing Presentation Framework, and Sil- new reporting and mail merge features control. The editor allows developers to verlight. Moving forward, the company that can be used in all supported .NET add Microsoft Word-like and browser- plans to include Android, iOS, OS X platforms. z like text editing and visualization capa- and Windows support. z SDT297 page 30-35_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:52 PM Page 30 2013: The Year SDT297 page 30-35_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:46 PM Page 31

www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 31 in Review “Selfies” rock, and social tools roll into the enterprise

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN chart in real time, it could affect his or her ability to close a deal. xford Dictionaries has named “selfie” as the That, in turn, has led to an explosion in both frameworks for creating appli- 2013 Word of the Year. Merriam-Webster cations that can run well on multiple decided “science” was the word of the year. devices with different operating sys- O tems and features, and in mobile app Put them together, and you get “social,” which is what testing, which can be done via device SD Times has identified as the top trend of 2013. emulation but can be more fine-tuned by testing against the actual device. As Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Part of that experience is about cus- On the mobile front, Apple contin- watch their valuations soar and make tomizing your presentation to your ued to work through the 2011 death of acquisitions to strengthen their posi- user, understanding what they want cofounder Steve Jobs, and released new tions in the rapidly growing social mar- and what they don’t want. That’s the versions of iOS and the iPad, but to ket, companies such as IBM, Google, driver behind the explosion of Big underwhelming reviews. Consumers, Microsoft and others are building Data. Businesses are trying to beat based on the not-so-scientific metric of social capabilities into their enterprise their competitors by getting that one looking at the crowds that still mass in offerings to redefine how people work. more shred of information about their Apple stores in malls across America A big part of their solutions involve customers. That information has to be and beyond, still love the technology, the cloud, and that’s where the science captured, stored and leveraged to pro- but competitors like Microsoft, Sam- part of social really comes to the fore, vide a greater level of engagement, and sung and HTC are providing stiff com- as companies in the industry worked to systems such as Hadoop (along with petition with Android and Windows build out the infrastructure and inte- the emergence of other data-manage- phones. grations that enable users to not only ment tools and repositories) are being Yes, it’s a fast-moving world, and how do such things as shop online and see shown to help organizations slice and you create your applications in 2014 and pictures and descriptions of items, but dice their data any way they like. beyond is almost as important as what to also connect with fellow shoppers Yet 2013 showed it’s not just about you create. Delivery cadences grow ever via text or video to talk about their how you reach your customers and end shorter, leaving less time for testing but shopping or usage experiences, or con- users, but where. The looming specter breaking down silos like never before. nect with a sales representative to of mobile has “photo-bombed” its way The rise of DevOps in 2013 showed that learn more about the item. Someday into every flowchart of how business is organizations benefitted from bringing we may even see drones delivering our being conducted. All of this back-end together agile practices, better code purchases right to our doorsteps within work is being done with the user expe- management, and improved build, con- minutes of placing an online order! rience at top of mind, helping to shape figuration and deployment techniques Internally, the use of social tools many business and IT decisions. If to keep pace with the increased fre- allows teams within organizations to people find an app’s interface clumsy, quency of business opportunities. collaborate on a project, find experts or if the connectivity from their device The term “selfie” was SO 2103! within their organization to learn from, of choice is poor, then the app will be Now, let’s get all those teams togeth- get a newsfeed of what other team considered a failure and a potential er—the developers, designers, cloud members are working on, and use harm to your business. If a salesperson architects, database managers, testers, video and imaging to make the engage- in the field can’t connect to a back-end and operations teams—so they can ment more immersive. warehouse tracker or updated price take a “groupie.” z SDT297 page 30-35_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:47 PM Page 32

32 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com The cloud in 2013: Expanding the possibilities

BY ROB MARVIN some of the issues driving competition guages and making advances in areas The cloud got a lot more crowded in and expansion as companies big and including DevOps, mobile application 2013. Cloud providers, users and enter- small vie for cloud supremacy. support, middleware, and integration prises have begun to realize the capaci- In the space, with cloud operating systems, with ty for what’s possible up there, and it’s a Amazon Web Services and EC2 (Elas- OpenStack being the open-source lot more than just storage. tic Compute Cloud), Google Cloud leader. Cloud computing platforms, PaaSes Platform, and Microsoft’s Windows Amid all the cloud innovation and IaaSes, mobile and enterprise app Azure and Team Foundation Server brought about by companies jockeying migration, virtualization, public versus continued to expand their application, for position, the cloud is still doing what private clouds, hybrid cloud architec- testing, and deployment tools and the cloud does best: storage. Cloud tures, cloud security: These are but services while increasing scalability storage in 2013 grew cheaper, more and elasticity. efficient and more diversified as start- In the meantime, PaaS and hybrid ups and industry leaders alike improved cloud architectures are gaining further capability and capacity. Apple’s iCloud, momentum and prominence, particu- Google’s Drive and Microsoft’s soon-to- larly in the enterprise market. Offerings be-renamed SkyDrive, along with such as Red Hat’s OpenShift Enter- cube-named startups Box and Drop- prise, Pivotal One, Rackspace’s hybrid box, are each competing for breadth of cloud and VMware’s Cloud Foundry storage and ease of access. are adding new programming lan- Yet as more and more information

Another big year for Big Data Hadoop 2.0 closes out giant year for growing platform BY ALEX HANDY offerings in 2013 thanks to its leader- Project Tajo offers a distributed data Big Data has only gotten bigger in ship position in building and rolling out warehouse system on top of Hadoop. 2013. Blame it on enterprises deploying Hadoop 2.0. With all that activity, it’s not surpris- Hadoop to production environments, And if there were no other Hadoop ing many companies saw success with or on NoSQL users who are spreading news in 2013 than Hadoop 2.0, we’d their Hadoop integrations and offerings data across hundreds of servers around still be able to log pages and pages of in 2013. MapR, Cascading and Zettaset the world at the same time. No matter dramatic changes that will occur all continued to fill holes in the Hadoop who’s responsible, however, 2013 was because of this shift in the platform. ecosystem, while a host of new analytics definitely the year in which Big Data This was the year Hadoop went gener- offerings came to market on top of became Big Business. al-purpose, and eschewed Map/Reduce Hadoop from companies like Tableau, Cloudera has long been the standard as the only method of batch processing. Pentaho, Splunk and Datameer. bearer for Hadoop, and its market It was also the year the HDFS But Hadoop was not the only story dominance continued in 2013. But the became highly available, and the year in Big Data for 2013. NoSQL databases unexpected freight train of power in the when a dozen new side projects continued to gain traction thanks to a ecosystem in 2013 was Hortonworks, cropped up in the : never-ending need to spread data which grew to a size rivaling Cloudera’s, Project Falcon focuses on building data around the globe in a highly available despite being founded two years after pipelines; MRQL is a query-processing and consistent form. To that end, a it. As the company behind vanilla optimization system; the Knox Project number of new transactional databases, , Hortonworks has locks a cluster down to a single access some calling themselves “NewSQLs,” drawn numerous new customers to its point; Sentry is a security project; and cropped up this past year. NuoDB, SDT297 page 30-35_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:53 PM Page 33

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and services shift into public, private, hybrid, or any other kinds of clouds up Major OS overhauls there, renewed and intensified security concerns have reared their ugly heads thanks to our friends at the NSA. In the as the HTML5 vs. wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the PRISM mass-spying program, national and global concerns about data native debate rages and cloud security are more prevalent than ever before. Is your data safe from BY ROB MARVIN prying eyes? Are public clouds more Looking back on the year in mobile, companies were all about changing secure than private? Server location, things up. As the move to mobile grows more prevalent on an ever- level of encryption and legal protection expanding number of devices led by smartphones and tablets, companies are questions that need to be asked such as Apple and Google rolled out new OSes with major overhauls in before cloud deployment, and we’re aesthetic, design and UI to match them. only beginning to learn the answers. In September, Apple launched iOS 7 with two new —the 5s But despite mounting security con- and 5c—to run it on. iOS 7 is the first major UI style and UX change for cerns, the cloud migration train is mov- the device, ushering in a new look and feel with a new color scheme, ing far too fast to stop, or even really to sharper UI geometry and more layered depth, plus new features like a stall. The possibilities of what can live, control center for the OS. what you can do and what profits can be Google saw the iOS 7 hype and raised it in October with a cross-brand made in the cloud are seemingly end- marketing campaign, partnering with Nestlé to promote its new Android less. At this rate, companies have no OS, KitKat 4.4. When it finally dropped on Halloween, KitKat came bear- reason not to keep loading virtual infra- ing new frameworks and APIs for faster multitasking, translucent system structure with storage, tools and servic- UI styling, and built-in Google Now functionality on the home screen. es until the cloud starts showing signs it KitKat was released with the vision to reach “the next billion Android can’t bear the weight. z users,” extending Android to Smart TVs and wearable technology. Behind the scenes, developer preferences for mobile app develop- ment continued to shift away from native toward hybrid HTML5. Web and hybrid approaches are becoming more popular with developers, as a FoundationDB and VoltDB all brought Telerik survey in October showed that the combination of HTML5 and databases to market in 2013 that JavaScript is the top choice for building cross-platform apps. While offered transactional support based on HTML5 is still closing the gap in terms of APIs, performance, education, the ideas and techniques shown in the tools and marketing, the native “one-size-fits-all” mobile development Google Spanner paper. solution is gradually being left by the wayside. The big three of NoSQL, however, Further down on the totem pole, Microsoft played catch-up in a big way continued to fight it out over customers throughout 2013. It merged Windows Phone and Windows Store develop- and market share. DataStax and Cassan- ment as part of its push to create a single app store for all platforms. (Not dra continued to be the most robust to mention bolstering its mobile footprint by acquiring Nokia’s devices NoSQL solutions, popular with the Wall and services business.) Its efforts were begin- Street crowd. MongoDB took its lumps ning to pay dividends, with a November this year, but also addressed many issues poll of mobile developers showing that in a powerful point release, such as the 32%—double that of 2013—plan to cre- default write reliability inherent in the ate Windows Phone apps next year. datastore. Couchbase divorced from its The year in mobile wouldn’t be com- CouchDB roots and took a new path, plete without mentioning one of 2013’s inspired by the melding of both biggest buzzwords: wearables. Google Membase and CouchDB. Glass, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch, What does 2014 herald for and a host of other wrist and eyewear Big Data? Companies to devices are in various stages of develop- watch include Basho, the ment, as new SDKs and even OSes like company behind Riak; Sqr- KitKat try to get a handle on the com- rl, the company behind Accu- ing wearable boom. This year, wearable mulo; and Hortonworks, which technology sits at the bottom of our should continue to grow at a mobile wrap-up. Next year, it may well be fast rate. z at the top. z SDT297 page 30-35_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:47 PM Page 34

34 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Open source Agile grows past Linux scaled BY ALEX HANDY up in ’13 For many years, the world’s largest open-source project was the Linux kernel and its ecosystem. With Linus Torvalds at the center and thousands of devel- BY CHRISTINA MULLIGAN opers working on the code around the world, the power of open-source Originally intended to outline a way development managed to push Linux from geeky toy in the 1990s to enter- for development teams to work prise IT mainstay by 2013. together more efficiently, agile in But the days when Linux was the largest, most complex open-source proj- 2013 went beyond software and ect are now over. Projects like Apache Hadoop and OpenStack are gaining exploded into the mainstream, leav- more and more contributions every day, and any day now, either of these proj- ing organizations to figure out how to ects could surpass Linux as the largest and most prolific open-source project scale the process beyond a team level. in the world. Some refer to this as the maturing Hadoop has dominated in the growing data capture and analysis world. of agile. Today, its name is almost synonymous with the term Big Data. Two surveys last year, one by Ver- OpenStack, on the other hand, has the potential to be even larger than sionOne and the other by the Scrum Hadoop. With Red Hat and Mirantis now fighting for the leadership role in Alliance, revealed that a majority of the project, and IBM coming into the game with Mirantis on its side, it won’t respondents believed the most sig- be long before OpenStack becomes a standard data center component: the nificant barrier to further adopting free way to build your own cloud. agile practices is trying to change the But that’s not to say that OpenStack is ready for common consumption organizational culture, and that just yet. 2013 saw the first commercial distributions of the platform come to organizations must encourage and market, but it’s still a DIY platform, requiring customizations and plenty of care and handling. Of course, the Linux kernel hasn’t been standing still. Over the past 10 years, every change in the core of the kernel has been leading up to the empowerment of Linux Containers (LXC). Containers allow applications to be packaged up for hosting on a Linux server, which can separate and isolate Developers other container applications. The end result is better server consolidation coupled with easier deployment, as containers are single artifacts. BY CHRISTINA MULLIGAN Docker.io took the LXC idea and ran with it, and in 2013, it broke out into This year had its fair share of the development community. Docker allows developers to package their breached enterprise networks and applications as Linux containers quickly and easily, simplifying deployment. software glitches. From more than 2014 Should be a big year for Linux containers, and for 38 million Adobe passwords being Docker. compromised to the embarrassing The actual open-source world in 2013 coalesced launch of HealthCare.gov, software even more around GitHub. The site remains the most developers were left scratching their popular place to host your software. But BitBucket heads on how to improve the quality also changed its offerings in 2013 to make private and security of their programs. repositories available for free, so GitHub is not with- The year started out its challengers. off with a stronger Eclipse saw a new release in 2013 as well, one that focus on testing. In smoothed many of the rough edges from the transition to January, Coverity (a Eclipse 4. NetBeans expanded as well, adding better Web lan- development testing guage development and support. tool provider) and The Apache Foundation, on the other hand, was SQS (a software wicked busy with Hadoop and Cassandra, but the quality and testing Foundation also stepped down from its position on services provider), the JCP’s executive committee, citing ongoing teamed up to expand problems with the Java TCK. z traditional software testing upstream into SDT297 page 30-35_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:47 PM Page 35

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create a culture focused on collabora- means to con- stressed. At the conference, Blueprint tion in order to deliver value nect and collabo- announced Enterprise Agile Require- to customers. rate seamlessly. ments: techniques for enterprises Damon Poole, chief agilest OpsHub, an ALM undertaking large, complex develop- at IT recruitment firm Elias - integration provider, ment projects. sen Group, explained that advanced agile into the enter- To help organizations achieve busi- one of the biggest mis- prise in May with its release of ness agility, Rally Software announced takes in agile is that it is OpsHub Integration Manager support for version 2.5 of the Scaled often thought of in terms of v5.3. The release improved Agile Framework (SAFe) in August. development, and that stake- integration between disparate The new release provided an online holders don’t fully understand the test-management and execu- knowledgebase of proven practices for scope of responsibilities or have tion tools used by teams to scaling agile across the enterprise; kept proper organizational support needed. enhance collaboration and visi- program and product managers Early in the year, VersionOne tried to bility among quality stakeholders. informed of potential misalignments turn back agile’s focus to the team with Microsoft continued to push agile to through visual cues; and delivered its release of TeamRoom, but as agile business decision-makers with what it immediate feedback on a project. adoption continued to grow, the focus called portfolio backlogs within its The year ended with Tasktop’s turned back to the enterprise. In May, Team Foundation Server. The backlogs announcement of Tasktop Sync 3.0, a the company released a new Portfolio give users a view that makes sense for major release of its flagship software Timeline and enhanced Conversations to the level they need. life-cycle integration platform. The support enterprise-wide agile initiatives In August, collaboration between release includes support for solutions within the company. By August, Ver- development teams and scaling agile from Rally, giving additional capabili- sionOne had extended agile collabora- across the enterprise were among the ties for agile software development. tion to include all software stakeholders. topics discussed at the Agile2013 con- With Sync, teams using Rally for agile CEO Robert Holler explained that in ference in Nashville. The need for more can easily collaborate with other teams, order to be competitive, all parties touch- instruction, planning and guidance on as well as keep track of user stories and ing the business initiative must have the how to collaborate with each other were test cases in quality assurance. z

focus more on testing and security development. The new partnership software was still compromised. new password system called Generating combines SQS’ knowledge in quality In March, the RSA Conference panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers process improvement through the soft- focused on traditional security practices and Humans Apart (GOTCHA) that uses ware development life cycle with over hot new inventions. It also inkblots and phrases to increase security Coverity’s technology in order to help addressed issues of security within the beyond encryption and hash functions. companies build efficient software cloud. SafeNet’s CEO Dave Hansen The year ended with a strong quality testing processes and prioritize said the problem is that there isn’t emphasis on continuous testing—test- spending. enough encryption in cloud-based data- ing in all areas of development to pro- Throughout the year, many compa- driven applications, and that companies duction, which helps prevent perform- nies began releasing new systems of don’t decide to encrypt their cloud data ance bottlenecks and assures quality testing. In February, Seapine released until after they’ve been breached. software, according to Tom Lounibos, the Defect Scribe testing service to May brought a new risk to app securi- CEO of SOASTA, a cloud and mobile help developers do better manual and ty. According to the Open Web Applica- testing company. exploratory testing. Zeenyx released an tion Security Project’s Top 10 list for Parasoft promoted continuous testing automated software testing tool, Ascen- 2013, the newest risk to app security is with its release in September of Service tialTest version 6, in June. In October, using components with known vulnera- Virtualization, an automated infrastruc- Load Impact released an automated bilities. This highlighted the importance ture for continuous testing. Server Metric Agent to help developers of developers using secure components And finally, in November, SOASTA detect, measure, analyze and predict to avoid exploitation by hackers. revealed 10 tips to improve user experi- server performance problems within After more than 38 million encrypted ence and application performance, with applications and websites. passwords were stolen from Adobe, each putting a strong emphasis on test- But even with new testing strategies, Carnegie Mellon University revealed a ing at every stage. z SDT297 page 36-40_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:56 PM Page 36

36 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Pulling back the curtain on Visual Studio 2013 More than new built-in features, latest release brings cloud, app store to developers’ fingertips

BY PATRICK HYNDS

isual Studio 2013 is the latest ver- sion of Microsoft’s premier, con- Vsistently productive developer franchise. At first glance this release feels more like a service pack update to Visual Studio 2012 than a new major update. The fact that it comes just a year since the last release reinforces this view. These conclusions are a big disap- pointment to some and have contributed to a chorus of pundits arguing for sitting this version out. But if you have ques- tions about it, look at the features out- side Visual Studio that this new version enables developers to leverage. Only then can you decide if you should drive your development to Visual Studio 2013. Enhanced Windows Store and Azure development is a big factor in where this new release will take you and why some might find it worth upgrading so soon SDT297 page 36-40_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:56 PM Page 37

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after the last major release. If you are potential, but let’s not forget that the already doing Windows Store develop- most over-hyped word in technology in ment or are entrenched in Azure as your recent years is “cloud.” The world has platform, then Visual Studio 2013 is an rapidly filled with cloud offerings, many obvious choice. Users of Team Founda- of which are either ill-conceived, disin- tion Server will almost certainly find a genuous in that they really have nothing great deal to like about this new version, to do with anything cloud-related, or but for many others there simply might are doomed. Duane Laflotte, CTO of not be enough to make the jump— CriticalSites, explained how he unless they skipped Visual Studio 2012 approaches the risks around any cloud or got it included with an MSDN sub- offering like this: “I always weigh the scription, something Microsoft seems to risk before building my company be pushing users toward more firmly in processes around systems in the hands each round. of others, and anything cloud fits this category.” To install or not install Laflotte pointed out two examples of There are two ways to get up and run- well-established cloud storage offerings ning with Visual Studio 2013. The tradi- that recently closed down. The first was Figure 1: Configuring Visual Studio based on tional way is to straight up install it on Nirvanix, with a sudden announcement the kind of development you wish to do. your client machine. If during this in September that caused its clients to process you opt for the default of scramble to find a new strategy and get development systems running on a virtu- installing all options, including Blend, their data someplace else. More recent- al environment managed by Microsoft LightSwitch and the Silverlight Devel- ly, Symantec’s Backup Exec cloud offer- on Azure can eliminate a lot of trouble. opment Kit, you will need 9.5GB of ing was withdrawn and, as in the case of The really good part of this cloud free space. Anyone with a history with Nirvanix, forced its customers to find option is that it removes the issue of Visual Studio knows the drill and can something else, right away. your development environment becom- then start customizing. Laflotte said his organization is not ing unstable and leading to the dreaded The first customization choice is worried about Azure in this regard. In his full reinstall. You can also spin up multi- presented when you first launch Visual opinion, there are some clear winners ple development environments, even Studio, where the user is presented who offer or leverage cloud technologies one per project, which will be useful with the choice of what kind of devel- in ways that seem much more likely to separation for consultants. opment he or she intends to do on the persist. Amazon springs to mind, and system. In Figure 1, you can see the More cloud stuff choice offered to configure the devel- As mentioned earlier, the cloud is a big opment environment based on the kind Visual Studio 2013’s part of Microsoft’s strategy going for- of development you do most. Unless cloud option ward and is a cornerstone for making its one of the choices really speaks to what new Devices and Services Strategy you do as a specialty, then choosing removes the issue work. It is no wonder then that “General” is a safe bet. Once you are of your Microsoft has molded Visual Studio down this road, backups and system 2013 in numerous ways that enable restore points are vital to ensuring that development development for Azure and for the if something goes wrong, you can Windows Store. The breadcrumbs are recover quickly. environment getting bigger and bigger as Microsoft The other, much newer way to get becoming unstable. tries to lead developers into making things started with Visual Studio 2013 is Azure the platform replacement for to use a cloud-based virtual environment Windows Desktop. hosted on Windows Azure. Microsoft with Azure exceeding a billion dollars in In that vein, another new capability now offers a full Visual Studio 2013 revenue recently, Microsoft seems to be of Visual Studio 2013 is represented by install as a virtual machine available via solidly on the same path. Microsoft is tak- the new Office/SharePoint App tem- the gallery, and thanks to changes in the ing its cloud play very seriously. plates, including the Cloud Business charge model that makes virtual If you have doubts, then hosting your App. This template allows you to inte- machines free when they are turned off, development environment on Azure is grate the Office 365 and Azure platform you only have to pay for the time that not a great idea. However, there are real into a cross-platform business app. The you are using it. Just remember to power advantages to the cloud option for run- template consists of four projects, it down when you are done. ning Visual Studio 2013. If being con- including an app for SharePoint Project This cloud-based option has great nected is not an issue, then having your continued on page 38 > SDT297 page 36-40_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:56 PM Page 38

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< continued from page 37 world. Barry Gervin, Microsoft regional source-code impact as I work through- 2013 projects that helps with communi- director and director of solutions deliv- out Visual Studio.” There are also new cating with Office 365; an HTML client ery for Navantis (one of Canada’s agile portfolio-management capabilities project for the user interface (hence the largest Microsoft partners), runs a glob- that he said allow him and his team to cross-platform targeting capability); an ally distributed team that spans three roll up work across a subset of teams ASP.NET project to bring the data into continents and 18 time zones. and create work plans at a higher level the solution; and a Cloud Business App When talking about Visual Studio than was previously available from just project that brings the other projects 2013, he said, “It has new features that looking at individual backlogs. together. This is not a magic cloud/cross- have a tangible impact on the day-to- Finally, during our discussions, platform pill, but an attempt to provide day life of my team as they are building Gervin said that while “debugging developers a road map with some of the enterprise applications.” In elaborating, improvements in Visual Studio are not architectural bits filled in. he said, “From a team collaboration usually the most obvious or quick-to- be-adopted features in Visual Studio, in 2013, the visual call stack combined with the ability to annotate with your own notes is fantastic for untangling the thorniest of problems.” As if to confuse us as much as possi- ble, Microsoft recently renamed Team Foundation Service to Visual Studio Online, and announced it with the launch of Visual Studio 2013. In a blog post, Microsoft vice president S. Somasegar described Visual Studio Online as “a collection of developer services that runs on Windows Azure and extends the development experi- ence in the cloud.” Figure 2: TypeScript can be installed through the New Project dialogue. TypeScript in Visual Studio 2013... almost If you do not do HTML5 and perspective, we are excited to leverage The efforts to make a better JavaScript JavaScript, or have no idea about which the new interactive discussion capabili- in the form of TypeScript have generat- end is up with SharePoint development, ties in TFS and VS 2013. ed a great deal of excitement, with the the learning curve will still be steep. “Although I like the idea of Team topic covered regularly in User Groups The November 2013 issue of MSDN Rooms for having threaded discussions and Code Camps everywhere. Type- has a walkthrough that shows how to use within Team System, I am most excited Script adds types, classes and modules, this template to build a sample recruit- about being able to comment and have and lets developers benefit from fea- ing application. To get through it you a discussion attached contextually to a tures that are missing from JavaScript, will need a SharePoint site, and the change set. This moves a lot of what we but compiles to standards-based examples assume you will use one from often do with e-mail across distributed JavaScript. Think of it as a way to type a dev.office.com. Again, the theme is to teams, right into TFS and next to the message with no slang and abbrevia- lead developers to MSDN and to the code. This is invaluable for people com- tions, and then having it output perfect- online services provided from Microsoft. ing back and looking at code later on in ly formed, grammatically correct prose. This is already a big audience in the a project. Being able to reference The hope was that TypeScript 1.0 enterprise developer space. If that is hyperlinks to work items fluidly by would ship with Visual Studio 2013. where your organization is going or using # is very natural to what we do in We almost got it, but not quite. In a where you want to go, then this is great, e-mail (‘@bgervin, this change has twist, the New Project dialog in Visual but for some this is another feature that caused a few problems with story #101 Studio 2013 does contain a TypeScript will not speak to their needs and may and bug #122’).” template, but instead of actually being fail to drive a need for Visual Studio There are several other updated a template, it is an invitation to install 2013 in their environment. areas that have improved the lot of peo- the latest version of TypeScript for ple like Gervin. He confessed, “I never Visual Studio (see Figure 2). This The TFS connection liked the embedded pending changes then redirects you to an HTML page Team Foundation Server is a real life- view in Team Explorer,” and went on to that brings you to the download for line to organizations with larger devel- explain, “I’m delighted I can now TypeScript for Visual Studio 2012 and opment teams working in the Microsoft undock this and keep a close eye on my 2013. As of this writing in early SDT297 page 36-40_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:59 PM Page 39

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December, this downloaded Type- As good as the CodeLens feature is, opening up tab after tab until I forget Script is version 0.9.1.1. there are limitations. A big one is that it where I was.” Distractions like this are will not track references for your code the enemy of productivity, and Peek Def- Edition drama, featuring CodeLens in XAML or ASPX files, so you might inition is a revolutionary way to avoid it. Each time there is a major release of end up with an incorrect count in the Visual Studio, there is some controversy references presented. .NET and ASP.NET 4.5.1 regarding what each edition provides, Visual Studio 2013 ships with .NET but more importantly what each edition Peek Definition Framework version 4.5.1, but as with deprives at the lower end. Visual Studio When a developer is in the part of the the last few versions, you can target any 2013 is not only not an exception, editor (where his or her attention version of the .NET Framework. The thanks to CodeLens only being avail- belongs), then anything that takes them only significant change between .NET able in the Ultimate edition, it seems to out of “the zone” is bad. Anyone who 4.5 and 4.5.1 is that the latter supports be worse this time with a number of has worked on writing anything that Automatic Binding Redirection for blog posts and articles lamenting this requires focus should relate to the fact assemblies. decision and heavily criticizing that interruptions can be a poison pill to Redirection of assembly versions has Microsoft. This is the focus of most who productivity. For that reason, anything been available since .NET 2.0, and it are making the argument to skip Visual that lets developers stay in the zone is allows you to specify an override such Studio 2013 unless you have access to good. CodeLens helps with this mis- that a different version of an assembly the Ultimate edition. sion, and Peek Definition works even will be used. This is a situation many CodeLens is a feature meant to keep more often in serving this purpose. developers seek to avoid since it is not developers in the code editor by provid- Peek Definition lets you not only see common knowledge that there is a ing important data for understanding code for a procedure called in the code mechanism that is available to work the status and back story of the code. It at hand, but it also opens it in a window around it. For example, if you have a is easy to assume that this would be a that lets you edit it without losing the project that targets a specific version of benefit for developers regardless of focus on the code. For this reason it can the .NET Framework, but depends on whether they work for a multinational be argued that Peek Definition, rather an older (or newer) version of a type corporation or alone in a garage. Nor- than CodeLens, is the biggest new fea- definition such as XML or some other mally the grousing is minimized when higher-end editions (read: higher-cost) Peek Definition lets you not only have features more suited to developers working on larger projects and on see code for a procedure called things typified by larger organizations. CodeLens, at first glance, does not in the code at hand, but it also seem to fit into this characterization, and some have claimed it is the best opens a window that lets you edit it new feature for developers in all of Visual Studio 2013. If you delve deeper without losing focus on the code. into CodeLens, there is the other side to the decision, which revolves around ture added to Visual Studio 2013. class that has evolved over time, then TFS 2013 and its version-control sys- It is a marked improvement on the you can direct the system to use the tem, as well as Lync being used by your previous mechanism of right-clicking desired version. In .NET 4.5.1, this is development team in order to get on a method or procedure name and done automatically when the everything that CodeLens offers. choosing Go to Definition, since the detects it for both Windows and Web For those who will have access to the Peek Definition keeps focus on the applications. Ultimate Edition, CodeLens provides a code at hand while the latter whisks you The ASP.NET team was quite busy heads-up display that for a lone pro- away to wherever that definition lives in in this version of Visual Studio, and grammer provides reference counts for the solution. Navantis’ Gervin listed it ASP.NET has what looks to be the simple code, and a great deal of detail as a huge improvement for his develop- longest list of new features of any piece for more complex and long-lived code ment, saying, “The new Peek Defini- of Visual Studio 2013. Sure to be a worked on by teams. After trying Code- tion gives me that next layer down favorite for Web developers is what Lens for a simple single developer proj- while encouraging me to stay focused Microsoft is calling One ASP.NET. ect, it really is not all that exciting. It where I am.” When creating a new ASP.NET project, shines when it can show links to TFS He went on to confess, “Historically, picking Web Forms no longer means Work Items and presence information when spelunking code, I would quickly that you are barred from leveraging fea- for the developers involved in the code get myself into trouble with ‘Go to Defi- tures from MVC in the project. As seen at hand. nition’—drilling further and further, continued on page 40 > SDT297 page 36-40_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:59 PM Page 40

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< continued from page 39 under that bridge since then. language if speed is your primary need, in Figure 3, no matter which of the The new ASP.NET Identity system, and it looks like Microsoft is going to templates you pick, additional folders sometimes referred to as One ASP.NET maintain that aspect. and references can be added to the Identity, preserves the old options of project. For example, many developers being able to store credentials in a SQL A whole lot more require the control for Search Engine database, but adds support for testabili- As we have seen, there are a number Optimization that is afforded by using ty, social media authentication, and of interesting new features in Visual MVC, but they do not need that level of claims-based authentication. Studio 2013, even though it does not control for ancillary pages, which might have as many new features as some be easier to build with Web Forms. C++ continues toward the mainstream previous releases. But there are still Now the project can benefit from the Microsoft has its promise of working to too many to detail completely here. best of ASP.NET. catch C++ up to the other languages, Regardless of how you use the devel- An updated version of SignalR (Sig- with features such as auto complete for opment environment, there are a nalR 2.0) is available with Visual Studio closing braces, such as parentheses, number of features that should be of 2013, and it takes this very interesting curly braces and square . Other great interest, such as Edit and Con- technology to a wider audience. Sig- features developers in C# and VB.NET tinue support for 64-bit applications, nalR allows all users of a and the fact that site to see updates from MSBuild is now being each other through the included in Visual Stu- magic of JavaScript. It is dio instead of as part of very handy for chat pro- the .NET Framework. grams (the default demo The key to enjoying used to explain the tech- any new version is to nology), but if you think check out the edition about it, other cool uses comparisons provided are bound to surface. by Microsoft to ensure I recently oversaw one the features you want or SignalR development need are in the edition project that allowed users you have or are looking recording podcasts or on at. This will prevent dis- conference calls to signal appointment like that each other through a associated by the choice browser without typing about CodeLens. that they want to interject It was a bit of a sur- when the current speaker prise to see that the finished talking. For pod- Figure 3: ASP.NET projects can have folders added to them easily. Professional edition casts, this eliminates a includes features like great deal of editing as people try to take for granted are better code format- Architecture Explorer, as well as collab- break in for times when the participants ting, improvements to Find All Refer- oration features like Code Review and are remote from each other and record- ences, and a resizable properties win- PowerPoint Storyboarding. Normally ing individually. For conference calls, dow. Many others would have these kinds of features would be especially during joint presentations, undoubtedly evolved if C++ had been expected to only exist at the Ultimate having a button that lets you raise your maintained over time as C# and level. Overall it would probably have hand helps create seamless transitions. VB.NET have been maintained and been a better choice to move these The new version brings abilities like improved. items to Ultimate, provided CodeLens sending messages to selected groups of There are also enhancements that could be brought into the Professional users instead of broadcasting them to make C++ better for Windows Store edition. all. There is also expanded client sup- development, and the addition of a With Microsoft seeming to be port to include iOS and Android clients REST SDK. As with past versions of releasing everything on a faster thanks to libraries from . Visual Studio, there are a bunch of oth- cadence, it might not Read this story on There are many more items on the er updates that are very niche and too matter so much as sdtimes.com list for ASP.NET 4.5.1, but the update numerous to list, but many of the C++- they can switch things to the Identity system is a big one. The related ones are focused on faster around and expand Membership Provider System added speed in either the resulting code or the these features to low- with .NET 2.0 was a great new feature, development environment. C++ er-end editions with but a great deal of water has passed already has a reputation for the best each release. z SDT297 Full page ads 41-64_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:08 PM Page 41 SDT297 page 42,43_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:20 PM Page 42

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Choosing the ‘right’ mobile app framework Whether you’re working in CSS, HTML, .NET or JavaScript, you can find one that fits your needs

BY LISA MORGAN out of existing Web app frameworks Xamarin even though its customers while others were designed specifically may use something else. obile app frameworks can for . Some are “We may start out with something speed up and simplify cross- commercial, others are open source. else because our customers want their Mplatform development, but like Some provide broad support for plat- product to be built on it, but as the all other tools, none of them will suit all forms, hardware and connectivity demands grow and as the maturity developers and all apps in all situations. options, while others provide compara- requirements increase, we end up with Choosing the “right” framework can be tively limited options. one of those three typically,” said Wolf confusing if you haven’t kicked their tires “There are different kinds of apps Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technolo- and popped their hoods. But once you and different kinds of developers,” said gies. “It depends on the actual use case.” do, it will become obvious that some Al Hilwa, program director of software When NTT DATA (the IT services frameworks suit you or your team and development research at IDC. “An arm of the NTT Group) evaluates your projects better than others. important aspect of selecting a frame- frameworks, it considers hardware sup- work is that it matches the kind of apps port, device-level access, rendering The benefits of mobile app frameworks you want to build. The abstraction level engine support, and what the frame- The debate about whether an app should of the language of framework also has to work is targeted at. It also considers be native or not has generally been be a good fit for the developers’ skills.” security, accessibility, UI widget answered by personal and collective For companies trying to target as designs, performance, the quality and experience: If you’re building an app that many devices as possible, by spending as comprehensiveness of documentation, depends on the nuances of a particular little as possible, mobile application and whether the framework integrates platform, or if the app requires excep- frameworks are the way to go, according with a Java or .NET-based back end. tionally fast performance, native is the to Julian Bucknall, CTO at DevExpress. “Each framework has its own bene- way to go. If you’re developing cross- “They give you a big step up,” he fits,” said Shamlan Siddiqi, vice president platform apps that offer the same basic said. “You are not starting from scratch, at NTT DATA. “jQuery Mobile is great functionality, frameworks can save you you are starting with whatever the but it’s not optimized for mobile. It looks precious time and money. mobile framework actually provides, great on iOS but it’s not good for any oth- “Applications are very similar in terms and that initial step up is extremely er platform. and Kendo of the experience they provide, their nav- valuable no matter whether you are try- UI are more complete packages, and igation and common features such as ing to brand your app to create an iOS then you have , contacting a server, saving something, or or Android app.” which is good for prototyping.” taking pictures,” said Daniel Pfeiffer, lead developer at Float Mobile Learning, No silver bullet A few things to consider a software development firm. “If you’re Some software teams use multiple Some teams choose a framework based building the same basic application for frameworks since no single framework on its list of features. They later regret iOS and Android, it doesn’t make sense meets all their needs. For example, their choice because the framework fell to reinvent the wheel.” enterprise development firm EastBanc short of the application’s requirements, Not all mobile app frameworks were Technologies tends to use HTML5, or it was not easy for developers to use, created equally, however. Some grew Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) and continued on page 46 > SDT297 page 45-47_Layout 1 12/20/13 1:55 PM Page 46

46 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com

< continued from page 45 or it failed to support the needs of the development team as technology or A guide to well-known frameworks their requirements evolved. n Adobe: Apache Cordova is a platform look and feel to all widgets and navigation NTT DATA built a heating, ventila- that enables programmers to build native elements inside the application. It is opti- tion and air conditioning (HVAC) unit- mobile applications using JavaScript, mized for Visual Studio developers, with tracking solution for a client’s sales HTML and CSS. It is a set of APIs that project templates and wizards to help engineering team using jQuery Mobile, allows an application to be built without developers get started quickly. Its inte- since the application would only run on any native code. Cordova is available for grated View Designer and code window in company-issued iOS devices. Android, , BlackBerry, iOS, Palm, Visual Studio, along with its device emula- “The considerations there were fast , WebOS and Windows Phone. tor, helps speed up the process of creat- time to market and ease of use. They ing, testing and debugging apps. didn’t care about any other platform oth- n Appcelerator: Titanium is Appcelera- er than iOS,” said Siddiqi. “Generally, tor’s open, extensible development envi- n Infragistics: Ignite UI enables develop- over time iOS is not the only platform ronment for creating native apps across ers to create an application that looks like your application will run on, so you different mobile devices and OSes, includ- a native app for Android phones and tables, iPhones, iPads, Windows Phone, might want to consider Sencha Touch or ing Android, BlackBerry and iOS as well as HTML5 and hybrid. It includes an open- Windows Surface, and desktop applica- maybe Kendo UI, something that sup- source SDK with more than 5,000 devices tions. The framework focuses on building ports all the major platforms and has the and mobile operating system APIs, an applications that run on multiple plat- right plug-ins. You also want something MVC framework, an Eclipse-based IDE, forms using one set of source code by that offers rich UI functionality, rich and a ready-to-use mobile back end. sensing the device the code is running on, native device functionality, and has the then changing the UI dynamically for that proper architecture framework built in. n DevExpress: DevExtreme is DevEx- device. Ignite is included in Infragistics It should also allow you to control your press’ HTML5 and JavaScript framework Professional and Ultimate suites, and can code, provide persistence and meet your for creating line-of-business apps for also be bought separately. performance requirements.” mobile platforms. DevExtreme detects While many of the frameworks focus the mobile platform at runtime and auto- n Intel: The Intel mobile App Framework on the client-side, there are also back- matically applies the appropriate “native” (originally known as jqMobi) is a cross- end considerations, since mobile devices are constantly interacting with services. to leverage existing HTML, CSS, to learn a different application model.” “It’s definitely about finding the right JavaScript, .NET or other popular Rather than writing code in a vacu- balance for each application,” said development skills, which lowers the um, today’s developers need to think Miranda Luna, barrier to adoption. But because tech- about design and user experience in Azure product manager. “If you’re going nology changes so quickly, developers greater detail than ever before. to go with a framework, make sure you nevertheless have to learn new skills. “We’re training people to go beyond can control the back-end resources “Sometimes things look similar but just coding the JavaScript library or you’re being given. Otherwise, you may are different on the inside,” said IDC’s coding HTML5 and CSS3 to think be getting to market quicker, but you Hilwa. “Using JavaScript as a language is about how mobile apps should be may have execution problems.” great, but developers using JavaScript developed,” said Siddiqi. “Skill reuse is Many frameworks stress the ability outside of a browser may find they have good, but today’s apps require more creativity and thinking outside the box.” Developers need to spend some Twelve hallmarks of a great mobile app framework time on user experience and design to n It meets all the application’s require- n Its documentation is accurate and understand how people use their appli- ments. complete. cations. “Users are getting used to the n It complements the skill sets of the n It’s extensible. affordances that mobile apps have pro- developers who will use it. n Its developer community is robust and vided them over the past couple of n It’s easy to use. active. years, and they are looking to see that in every application they use,” DevEx- n Its footprint doesn’t add unnecessary n It supports older browsers. press’ Bucknall said. overhead. n It enables a native look and feel. While a framework may align with the n It’s scalable enough to support tomor- n It provides an appropriate mix of needs of a particular project and a devel- row’s requirements. abstraction and under-the-hood cus- oper’s skill set, it may nevertheless be an n Its creators and contributors are dedi- tomization capabilities to suit project unwise choice if it does not scale, it is not cated to continuous improvement and and team requirements. well maintained, or the documentation is providing timely updates. incomplete or out of date. SDT297 page 45-47_Layout 1 12/20/13 1:55 PM Page 47

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platform HTML5 framework that allows be written in Java or JavaScript, so tions for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone and developers to write applications target- there’s no need to learn a new program- Windows Phone 8. The HTML5 and ing Android, BlackBerry 10, iOS and Win- ming language for each platform. JavaScript UI framework also provides UI dows Phone 8 platforms using a single widgets as part of the larger Kendo UI plat- codebase. It uses the latest features of n Sencha: Sencha Touch is a full-stack form for desktop and mobile development. JavaScript and CSS3 to speed up HTML5 JavaScript framework that enables performance on mobile devices. developers to build HTML5 apps that per- n Verivo: With Akula, Verivo offers more form like native. It offers a wide selection than a framework, it offers an enterprise n jQuery: jQuery offers an open-source of out-of-the-box themes for Android, mobile application platform. The Akula and touch-optimized framework for BlackBerry, iOS, Tizen and Windows. platform consists of an enterprise server, smartphones and tablets: jQuery Mobile. Developers can target any platform for management console, native client SDKs The framework is built on top of the pop- their apps and apply platform-specific for Android and iOS, and a hybrid Cordo- ular development tool jQuery and pro- themes using the theme-switching fea- va/PhoneGap SDK that supports Android, vides a unified, HTML5-based user inter- ture. Sencha Touch supports Apache Cor- iOS, Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT. face system for all popular mobile device dova to utilize device-level APIs like cam- Akula client SDKs are designed to comple- platforms. Its emphasis on semantic era, accelerometer, file storage and more. ment whatever application-development markup and progressive enhancement tools and frameworks are best for the user. makes it easy to use. n Syncfusion: Orubase is a mobile devel- opment framework built for developing n Xamarin: Xamarin offers two mobile n Oracle: ADF Mobile is a Java and line-of-business mobile applications tar- framework products: Xamarin.Android HTML5-based mobile development geting Android, iOS and Windows Phone and Xamarin.iOS. Both frameworks allow framework that enables developers to platforms. Orubase can easily be used to developers to create mobile applications build and extend enterprise applications wrap ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC mobile using C# and the .NET framework, and for Android and iOS from a single code- websites. It comes with a full complement they provide full access to standard base. Based on a hybrid mobile architec- of mobile JavaScript controls, so there is Android or iOS APIs. If an Android devel- ture, ADF Mobile provides access to no need to use a separate UI framework. oper decides to support iOS in the future native device services. It offers more (or vice versa), the frameworks allow than 60 UI components and comes with n Telerik: Developers can use Kendo UI developers to reuse up to 90% of existing built-in security. The application logic can Mobile to build native-like mobile applica- C# code. z

“You really need to think ahead,” opment, although their support of top or mobile device. said John Roescher, CEO of design hardware, accessibility and connectivity “Certainly in 2014 and 2015, the consulting firm Handsome. “You need options varies significantly, as does their cloud is going to become [an] extremely to think about what you’re going to sup- ability to enable hybrid (partially interesting space, and it is going to be port in the future and whether the native) app development. used more and more by tablets and framework will be viable.” Hardware support, which is spotty mobile devices,” said DevExpress’ A quick comparison of the various among some frameworks, is expected to Bucknall. mobile app frameworks reveals that improve given that more types of apps Lastly, support for hybrid applica- investment levels, in terms of capital are beginning to use the broad array of tions is expected to become more com- and development efforts, vary greatly. sensors available on today’s smart- monplace since native applications are While some open-source communities phones, for example. Also, expect near too time-consuming to build in every and vendors have worked to keep up field communication support, Blue- instance, and abstracted cross-platform with the latest mobile development tooth support, and support for other apps may lack the depth of functionality trends, others are lagging behind. hardware options to increase based on and performance to deliver specific “Release frequency is something to market needs. types of experiences. consider. Some of these frameworks get Accessibility options are also expected “A truly great mobile app frame- stuck in version 0.8 or 0.9, and the fre- to become more common, although not work allows me to build a mobile appli- quency between releases may be months everyone agrees on the forces that will cation that is truly unique as quickly as or a year,” said Float Mobile Learning’s drive them. Some say market demand possible and as specific as possible to Pfeiffer. “When a bug occurs or when a will fuel greater accessibility options, my particular circumstances,” said new operating system comes out with while others anticipate legislation that EastBanc Technolo- Read this story on huge changes like iOS 7, you can get stuck will make them mandatory. gies’ Ruzicka. “Too sdtimes.com waiting for the framework to be updated.” The cloud is starting to become a often the frameworks more important place. As people rely try to be everything to Where frameworks are headed on it more, large corporations are trying everybody, and they Most of today’s mobile app platforms to provide cloud-type experiences for end up being nothing are designed for cross-platform devel- writing applications on a traditional lap- to anybody.” z SDT297 page 48new_Layout 1 12/23/13 12:57 PM Page 48

ns plicplication ouro ApplicationsAppA n! Y vvolutionlu tio evevelop xtt Rev DevelopDeveDe e YourNext ApplicationsRRev forfoor thehe NextN Revolution!

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JavaScript, page templates, images and media files. Each of these may require different tools and take different amounts of time to process. For example, a Web-scraping tool might be able to migrate the content of a single page in a few seconds, but this BY BILL BEARDSLEE would not be representative of the time required to transfer other resource our enterprise website needs an types. Images might need to be overhaul, and your development resized or reformatted to fit the Yteam has been asked to make it new page templates, and so they happen. Your ability to simultaneously take significantly longer to be move all four of the project pillars— migrated. You also need to factor in technology, infrastructure, team skills time to manually check and validate and communication—will have bearing each page, to make sure they’ve been on the success of the project. Of all the properly migrated and don’t break different IT projects an enterprise can when rendering. undertake, perhaps none is as challeng- (CAUTION: The code captured by ing as a website deployment. Web scraping does not transfer varia- We have seen these challenges come tion functionality, such as geolocation in different shapes and sizes at Magno- and personalization parameters. These lia, ranging from migrating existing may need to be reconfigured or rewrit- content to making sure that developers ten prior to the launch of the new site.) who are actually implementing the Avoiding resource duplication is project (you) are adequately trained. another potential issue. In many cases, Understanding what to expect the same resource might be referenced will help you to create an from multiple website pages. If your effective risk-mitigation migration tool isn’t intelligent enough plan and ensure that your to detect this, you’ll end up with mul- website project doesn’t tiple copies of the resource in your go down in flames. asset library. Cleaning up these duplica- tions is usually a manual (and time-con- Underestimating suming) process, especially with content migration time libraries containing thousands of assets. Migrating existing content helps visitors retain their sense of familiarity with Miscalculating bandwidth and your online presence, and it also helps network requirements your website maintain its position in Large-scale websites typically run as search engine rankings. But content multi-tiered applications on different migration is a tricky process. It’s not server hosts, so an improperly planned only page content that needs to be network can quickly become a bottle- migrated; you also have to migrate CSS, continued on page 50 > SDT297 page 49-51_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:34 PM Page 50

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< continued from page 49 that is completely agile and requires will be updated and bugs will be neck. A common mistake is to estimate minimal hard-coding or up-front defini- squashed. That’s why your post-launch the bandwidth required to transfer tion. This allows you to dynamically plan should include processes for web- data between server and client, but to adapt your data to future needs with site backup, restore and upgrade. forget to also estimate the bandwidth minimal manual effort. When defining a backup schedule, needed to transfer data between the ask yourself the question, “If a website application and its back-end data store. Making security an afterthought failure occurs right now, how many Similarly, in big, distributed cluster sys- Tight project deadlines often hours of data can be lost without a tems with multiple nodes, data syn- mean less time for discussions of secu- critical impact on the business? A chronization between nodes occurs rity. However, unless you design securi- week? A day? An hour?” The answer periodically, and failing to account for ty measures from the start, you run the to this question will determine your the impact of these (sometimes large) risk of data theft, downtime and delays. backup interval. For most companies, data transfers across the network is a A common mistake is to assume that a daily backup will usually suffice; common error. your development team will These miscalculations affect your put in the obvious safeguards A baby-step philosophy, website because without sufficient like access control lists and bandwidth, your website can’t scale to automated monitoring tools; which focuses on meet sudden jumps in traffic. You they might not, so always rolling out small might have powerful servers with many double-check. Third- gigabytes of RAM and multicore CPUs, party penetration test- projects first, offers but if your network is choked, incoming ing services can help a better chance of requests won’t even get to those identify gaps in your servers, leaving website visitors high website security. You can project success. and dry. Insufficient bandwidth also also use the Open Web makes it more difficult to prioritize cer- Application Security Project tain types of content (like streaming (OWASP) and the WebGoat video); put simply, if your bandwidth is project to learn more about improving however, if you have a large team of fully utilized, there is no reserve avail- website security. editors and near-constant website able to keep your media streams flow- updates, you might even want to back ing smoothly. Outsourcing scalability to the cloud things up every four to six hours. In most cases, your network equip- There’s a common preconceived Remember that cloud backups are ment vendor will provide tools to per- notion that adding hardware on typically more complex than regular form network and bandwidth analysis. demand (a.k.a. “the cloud”) is sufficient physical server backups; the shared In addition, you can use tools like Wire- for a website to scale with traffic. This is nature of cloud servers usually means shark, NMAP and NAST to analyze and a fallacy: Web applications won’t fully you have to work harder to ensure that monitor your network, identify bottle- use available resources, such as multi- your backup contains all your data and necks, and check bandwidth usage at core CPUs or additional nodes, unless only your data. different times. This information goes a they are programmed to do so from the Equally important is restoring from long way to help you accurately calcu- beginning. a backup. A common mistake is to per- late your network and bandwidth Distributed processing frameworks form a daily backup but never test it, to needs. like Apache Hadoop, in-memory dis- simply assume that it will work as need- tributed systems like Infinispan, and ed. In many cases, this assumption is Choosing an inflexible distributed caching engines like incorrect: Changes in server infrastruc- data-storage engine Ehcache can help distribute load across ture might render a backup invalid, or a Your website’s data spans a range of for- multiple servers. Java application lack of familiarity with the restoration mats (structured, semi-structured and servers like WebLogic and WebSphere process might result in longer down- unstructured), and it is important that come with clustering built in; using this times. As a general rule, plan on testing your data storage engine is flexible feature can improve application scala- your backup and restore processes at enough to accommodate them all. bility, but at the same time, be aware least monthly to avoid problems during Some content-management tools that doing so will always incur some a genuine crisis. require you to define your data types up cluster-management overhead. When handling website upgrades, front, and even write code to handle you will need separate environments to such data types. This restricts your Forgetting the post-launch plan test the new version of the website degrees of freedom, making it harder to You won’t deploy your website before rolling it out to production. Typ- leverage your data in new ways in the once and then forget about it. As time ically, you will first deploy to a develop- future. Choose a data storage option passes, features will be added, pages ment environment with minimal data, SDT297 page 49-51_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:33 PM Page 51

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then to a test environment with a larger key software architecture issues with Being afraid of change sample of data, and finally to an inte- you and your implementation partner Developing an enterprise website gration environment that has a full copy and ensure that best practices are fol- is as much a political process as a techni- of the production data. This last step lowed. The vendor can also help scruti- cal one. At the beginning, you must get also provides useful hints about the nize and monitor your implementation all stakeholders to agree on the high-lev- amount of time the upgrade will actual- partner’s performance throughout the el issues: technical and branding require- ly take. Finally, if everything works well, project, highlight risks and provide ments, budget, schedule, team, and you’ll back up the current production ongoing consulting to resolve issues vision. But as work progresses and meat website with all its data (as a failsafe that crop up during implementation. begins to appear on the website’s bones, against unforeseen failures) and then expect the lower-level details (icons, deploy the new website. Doing too much at once fonts, navigation, copy style) to take cen- Many enterprise website imple- ter stage, as more people come forward Skimping on developer training mentations fail because they try to do with criticism and feedback. This feed- (and retraining) too much in the first release phase. We back typically reaches a crescendo in the Selecting the right technology is only have seen some organizations launch three months prior to launch, when it part of the puzzle; you also need to their main site first, followed in the will seem as though everyone, from mar- make sure that your development team coming months by regional or flanker keting and sales to developers, IT man- has the knowledge to maximize their brand sites. Not only is such an imple- agers and C-level executives, has some- use of the technology. A Forrester mentation plan more prone to failure thing to say about every little detail. Research article said that 50% of the (simply because of the larger number To ensure that the large volume of typical IT budget is spent on ongoing of moving parts involved), but it also often-conflicting feedback doesn’t operations and maintenance. By train- creates stress for both the management derail the project, it’s important to ing your team in current best practices and the developers implementing the establish some ground rules. Openly and giving them the skills to write more system. communicate progress and important maintainable code, you will reduce A baby-step philosophy, which decisions to all stakeholders, both inter- your long-term software costs and focuses on rolling out small projects nal and external. Ask for feedback as increase the longevity of your website. first, offers a much better chance of needed, but weigh it appropriately. And Almost as important as training is project success. After the initial project finally, don’t be afraid of change. Fol- retraining. Technology vendors are con- release, continue with subsequently lowing an open communication policy stantly evolving their products, so it’s more-complex site releases. This might well result in significant changes important for your development team to approach steadily improves the system that affect the trajectory of the project; “go back to school” after each major and sets up a positive feedback loop, if you expect and embrace this, instead release. Retraining helps get developers wherein user feedback is used to of being afraid of it, it will always pro- up to speed on current best practices, improve the system on an ongoing duce a better result than the alternative. improves their ability to identify techni- basis. In his article “The Beta Principle: A large-scale website deployment is cal risks faster, and reduces the time Skip Perfection & Launch Early,” more fraught with risk than the typical IT they spend on research. Stop thinking of author Scott Belsky discusses the project, not just because of the time and training as a cost item; instead, think of it virtues of “launching in beta”: money involved, but also because of the as the most effective way to reduce your “On a practical level, you can only potential impact on the firm’s reputation long-term maintenance costs. get feedback and real user data when if it fails. For many companies and organ- the product is released... Rather than izations, a website is its most visible face Ignoring the vendor’s expertise spending many months (and lots of to the market. But don’t let the high Your implementation partners money) on the finer details, getting ear- stakes discourage you. You can make might claim to know what they’re doing ly feedback can lead to priceless realiza- your website deployment a roaring suc- while in fact they don’t. Or they might tions.” cess, simply by edu- Read this story on try to lock you in by selling you libraries A side effect of this incremental cating yourself about sdtimes.com or modules they “already have” to approach is that it ends up training the the likely issues you’ll reduce implementation time, but which users on the processes and operations encounter and making are maintainable only by them. of the new system, thereby fostering sure that you’ve Adding your software vendor to the faster enterprise-wise adoption over planned for and miti- conversation helps mitigate these risks, the long term. And by allowing stake- gated important risks. z because the vendor has the necessary holders to incrementally define their Bill Beardslee is CEO of expertise to identify possible imple- needs so that only those features that Magnolia’s American busi- mentation flaws and a vested interest in are actually needed get implemented, ness unit. Magnolia is a con- seeing the project through to a success- it also results in optimal use of develop- tent-management system ful conclusion. The vendor will discuss er time. provider. SDT297 Full page ads 41-64_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:08 PM Page 52 SDT297 page 53-55_Layout 1 12/20/13 12:58 PM Page 53

www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 53 To keep software running consistently, pay attention to the system setup

Chef, , , and Bcfg2 have rewritten the rules for

BY ALEX HANDY

en years ago, there were only two choices for provi- Tsioning and configuration management: CFEngine and IBM Tivoli. Neither solution was up to the challenges of the cloud or even the virtualized data cen- ter, and thus Puppet and were born. But today, Puppet and Chef are no longer alone: New tools have cropped up from Ansible- Works and SaltStack, and they both offer healthy alternatives for DevOps. continued on page 54 > SDT297 page 53-55_Layout 1 12/20/13 12:59 PM Page 54

54 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com

< continued from page 53 Recipes are written to describe what a their desktop machine. These can “Admins are becoming developers,” system should look like in its end state; quickly be ported to Ansible. said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of perhaps that means installing a specific When it comes to business needs Puppet Labs. “There is a shift going on version of Java, then Apache Web Serv- and compliance, however, Chef and around what [the] operations role is. It er, then Tomcat. Puppet are lacking in one major fea- becomes much more about the entire Both Chef and Puppet achieve their ture: speed. This is why Salt was creat- application, and the view of it that the goals through scripts that define how a ed. In a world of always-on cloud business has. It’s much more about the system should be configured and laid servers, Salt’s big trick is to immediately vertical silos than it used to be. You’re a out. Thus, the meat of the DevOps day enforce changes to servers, ensuring DBA sys admin or a virtualization sys job can quickly become the care and that if a system is out of compliance now, it can be brought into compliance within a few minutes. ‘The minute you solve the “bits on disk” problem, the user still Jostling for features When it comes to capabilities, both has big problems: It looks like Chef and Puppet have five-year head an application deployment starts on Ansible and Salt, but that’s not problem.’ always an advantage. CFEngine was —Luke Kanies, Puppet Labs created in 1993, but it was long ago cast aside in favor of tools that addressed the new needs of the IT admin. admin. Now there are technology spe- maintenance of all Chef and Puppet But so too do Salt and Ansible cialists. Once you’ve got the automation scripts. address the needs of users, particularly in place, it becomes about the horizon- The end game here, however, is to in cloud-based environments. Kevin tal extraction that works across an appli- get to the point where systems can be Smith, vice president of engineering at cation. There’s all this change going on, programmatically defined and dynami- Opscode (the company behind Chef), and in some ways it’s all relatively pre- cally provisioned. It is for this reason said that both Salt and Ansible have dictable.” that Chef uses Ruby as its Recipe pro- grown to meet provisioning and config- So what, if anything, distinguishes gramming language. uration-management needs that the four commercial provisioning and Just as each Java team would have weren’t being met in the marketplace. configuration-management systems? someone charged with maintaining Ant That said, however, he also intimat- For one thing, Puppet is strictly scripts, or with keeping a local Maven ed that some of the ideas these other focused on handling the configuration repository up to date, Chef and Puppet projects espouse are now being taken of servers after they’ve been stood up. are often the focus for semi-code aware on by both Chef and Puppet. It specializes in going through a fresh IT folks. “My personal take on both Ansible system and flipping all the important But when the person charged with and Salt is they do have good ideas bits you’ve specified beforehand: user handling these scripts comes from the there,” said Smith. “Rarely does some- access controls, network routing infor- development side, it can quickly one build something like this just for mation, HTTPD configuration and become obvious that coding Recipes fun: They have an itch they want to .htaccess, as well as anything else that and Puppet scripts is a fulltime job. It’s scratch. In Ansible’s, case I think the can be changed on a server. no wonder so many developers have motivation there is to address some of Chef, on the other hand, is all about warmed up to Ansible. the difficulty that more mature tools like actually installing all the various com- Ansible is a simple take on the con- Chef and Puppet have in getting set up ponents, and building a server from figuration and provisioning problem. and getting productive in their environ- scratch. It does this through Recipes. Instead of handling installs and script ments. Salt is much more about instant execution from a central server, Ansible execution, which is something we’re just opens an SSH connection to the addressing with push jobs in Chef.” machine it’s provisioning, and then runs Puppet Labs’ Kanies said of Ansible: regular shell scripts. “I think it’s very cute. It’s great to have Half of the appeal here is that projects trying to find the edges of the Ansible does not require a new market. It’s a complicated time, language, or an extensive peri- because there’s a very high churn in the od of initial script creation; early innovator market. Inside of a many developers already have startup that has no admins, the things installation scripts lying they’re looking at in a configuration- around their test cluster or on management solution are going to be SDT297 page 53-55_Layout 1 12/20/13 1:00 PM Page 55

www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 55

fundamentally different from what ably from one customer to another. A and focuses vary widely from organiza- enterprises are looking for. Overall, the stateless wide-scale Web application tion to organization. That means Pup- push by Ansible and Chef and Salt to might not need any orchestration at all. pet and its ilk have to address more take over the market is a sign of the For something like a three-tier applica- than just the hardcore coder. health of the market.” tion, that probably needs more ordered “You do see a segregation where you Kanies is not a fan of some of the bits on disc. It’s something we’re spend- get people who are more developer-like solutions proposed by these other ing a lot of time on.” and focus on the original code and options, however. A deeply passionate But no matter which problems your focus on the things they’re more special sys admin at heart, he created Puppet configuration-management systems at,” said Kanies. “Then there’s user peo- because he was fed up with CFEngine’s are solving, one thing is certain: Con- ple who say ‘I want four of those.’ ” shortcomings. figuration management and provision- To address those “user people,” Pup- Michael DeHaan, CEO of Ansible- ing systems can very quickly turn your pet Labs is aiming to build a simpler Works, said that “Ansible focuses on operations team into a development interface for configuring machines. The simplicity.” He said that Ansible is team, or turn your development team idea is to allow users to pick broad designed to execute its tasks in a rigidly into an operations team. That’s strokes of configuration, and to have ordered manner, thus ensuring admin- because Chef and Puppet require a lot those configurations assembled, some- istrators can have the same set of steps of configuring and scripting on their how, without the need to write lengthy executed in the same order on every own, enough to be a full-time job for scripts. machine. Chef and Puppet both rely on your DevOps people. “You can say ‘I want all the machines their knowledge of the host operating In this way, DevOps can be quite in my London data center, but I want to system to determine the order of their similar to development, at least in upgrade them 10% of the time.’ You actions, and thus installing items in a workflows. “We treat our Cookbooks can do either percentages or individual specific order can be tricky with Chef and Recipes as being source code, the node counts,” said Kanies, describing and Puppet. same as any of our application compo- the capabilities of Puppet Enterprise, This, however, was always touted as one of the more important features of Puppet: You didn’t need to care about the order of installation, or even how ‘We treat our Cookbooks and things were installed. If Puppet ran Recipes as being source code, against a server and it was not fully con- the same as any of our figured properly at the end, you’d just run Puppet against it a second time. application component source.’ That’s very different from the way —Kevin Smith, Opscode Ansible takes on the problem. “I think Puppet was originally a very good step above CFEngine, but what we’ve been nent source,” said Opscode’s Smith. the company’s commercial version of doing is looking beyond the way Puppet “It’s stored right alongside the compo- Puppet and its surrounding tools. does things,” said DeHaan. nent it’s going to deploy. As that com- Opscode’s future is taking a different However, the very complexity of ponent goes through its life cycle, it approach, with Hosted Chef, a SaaS Chef and Puppet allows them to address can be maintained in parallel. That’s a product offering that takes away the complex configuration and provisioning fairly common pattern we see out in need to host your own Chef server. needs that are the bread and butter of the wild too.” For Ansible, DeHaan said that serv- large IT shops. Specifically, Kanies said ice orchestration and rolling updates that the next obvious step for such sys- Future planning committee are of paramount importance to tems is service orchestration. Because so many IT admins are now Ansible’s enterprise appeal. While the “It’s kind of the next big thing,” he writing Chef and Puppet code all day, platform is about agentless and simple said. “Configuration management start- both platforms are growing to address configuration management, he said ed out as a ‘bits on disk’ problem. How these needs. Puppet Labs, for example, that one of the prime facets of the do I get these bits onto a machine? The acquired Geppetto, an IDE for writing tool is the ability to pull from a Git minute you solve that problem, the user Puppet scripts, this summer. Geppetto repository on a regu- Read this story on still has big problems: It starts to look contains “all the tools a developer lar basis, and to sdtimes.com like an application deployment prob- would expect to have, focused on con- enforce those config- lem. In order to do continuous delivery, figuration management rather than urations across a clus- you’ve got to have some aspects of overall application development,” ter, moving slowly orchestration. Kanies explained. across servers like a “Orchestration needs vary consider- Still, he noted, DevOps skill levels lathe of updates. z SDT297 Full page ads 41-64_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:09 PM Page 56 SDT297 page 57_Layout 1 12/19/13 2:56 PM Page 57

www.sdtimes.com January 2014 SD Times 57 Code Watch BY LARRY O’BRIEN Grading the MOOCs: Incomplete

’ve recently gone back to college. Well, not exact- on my continuing education, and I enjoy learning, Larry O’Brien is a Ily, but I have been attending a single class via a but a video explaining the universality of the “bind” developer evangelist/ massive open online course (MOOC). The course function has a substantially higher cognitive load advocate for Xamarin. Read his blog at I’m taking is “Principles of Reactive Programming” than a video in which goats scream like people. www.knowing.net. and is offered by Coursera. It’s being taught by Mar- A weekly Google+ Hangout with some friends tin Odersky, Erik Meijer and Roland Kuhn. taking the course was a crucial spur that unfortunate- The high-order bit of any discussion of MOOCs ly fell apart over the Thanksgiving holiday. Coursera’s has to be set to the quality of the lecturers: Odersky discussion forums are impressively productive (the is Scala’s inventor; until recently, Meijer was a lead- students produce high-quality answers to both sim- ing force in Microsoft’s languages division; and ple and complex questions), but scheduling an actual Kuhn is the technical lead of the well-regarded discussion is, for me, far more motivating (and I sus- Akka framework. These are the types of speakers pect that an in-person meetup would be more moti- that would be exciting to hear give a 1-hour keynote vating still). In the future I probably will not attempt at a conference; the privilege of receiving a coordi- a MOOC unless I can get at least a few friends to nated 7-week course from such speakers is, by far, commit to a weekly video chat. the dominant takeaway from the experience. Those are my general observations, but I imag- Not that the technical experience is bad. ine that many readers will be curious about the spe- Coursera’s infrastructure is very efficient. Signup cific course. I’ll reiterate that the lecturers are uni- is easy, pages are attractive, and all the logistical formly superb. The content is elements of the course (lectures, assignments and more academic than my friends The lecturers might be discussion forums) are easy to navigate. (I’m not and I expected, taking weeks to world-class, but no MOOC can sure if this is a broadly available feature, but the establish the “principles” spoken course’s homework-grading technology is quite of in the title. C# developers provide the rich experience slick: There’s a “submission” build target that familiar with that language’s asyn- uploads your code to a server that subjects it to a chronous features will have a leg of a college community. test suite, scores it, and posts the results to your up on the concept of Futures, account within a few minutes.) while familiarity with the Reactive Extensions gives The video lectures are also very clean. Rather an advantage only in week 4. than being PowerPoint or Keynote recordings, the The consensus in the discussion forums is that the content appears crisply displayed against a white course’s assignments are not as well worked out as background. It’s clear the text is being rendered the lectures. Rather than the “five to seven hours per directly, not videotaped from a whiteboard, yet the week” predicted in the course description, my lecturer’s hand occasionally appears to annotate friends and I (all of whom have professional Scala the content. It’s a nice piece of sorcery. I’ve mostly experience) have been taking eight to 10 hours and streamed the lectures and not had any buffering have thrown up our hands at certain things. I would issues, but they are also available for download. imagine that future sessions will be smoother, at least MOOCs had their 15 minutes as The Next Big with fleshed-out requirements and in some cases, I Thing a few years ago and now are suffering a bit think, scaling back the ambition of the assignments. of a backlash. Completion rates for MOOCs are This programming course provides a learning abysmal, even when controlling for various factors experience substantially deeper than what can be (e.g., college credit offered, being paid to take the had at conferences and, for the third time, the lectur- course, etc.). The lecturers might be world-class, er quality is untouchable. Although I don’t suppose but no MOOC can provide the rich experience of I’ll repeat this course in order to get a perfect assign- Read this story on a college community. ment score, I’d sign up for an F# variant in a heart- sdtimes.com I’ll admit that I’ve fallen behind in my class and beat. In the meantime, I’ll tweet (@lobrien) whatev- will not complete all the assignments, even though er courses for which I do sign up. If you do the same, I was well prepared for the topic. As with SD maybe we can Google Hangout together and moti- Times readers, I understand that my career relies vate each other to be better programmers. z SDT297 page 58_Layout 1 12/19/13 2:55 PM Page 58

58 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Guest View BY REBECCA RAY Five rules to follow when building

Rebecca Ray is a senior consultant at Common software for the world market Sense Advisory, a Massachusetts-based independent research our company is never too small to make mon- on) are “handed off” from your team to the local- company. Yey from international markets. If you’re ization team means that localized versions are developing applications that are downloadable viewed as add-ons rather than the important rev- from the Web (and who isn’t these days?), then enue generators they really are. you already have a worldwide distribution chan- To solve this problem, treat your source lan- nel, whether or not you’re ready to support it. guage as if it could be replaced with any language. Here are five guidelines to follow when organizing This forces you to update your development and your development team to build world-aware release processes to be globally focused, rather products: than elevating the needs of the domestic market above all others. For example, do your localizers Engage product managers and designers have as much context as you do when translating a 1.in the localization process. To create new user interface function? If the answer is “no,” shared ownership for global customer satisfaction consider how to foster a localization environment across your organization, set up a roundtable or an within your product to fix this problem. advisory group. Meet on a regular basis to focus on building the required infrastruc- Use agile to make your process more To mature into a globalized ture and processes to enable 4.nimble on a global scale. Teams that company, you must move product management, design, implement some flavor of agile development development, and localizers (the methodology often find that it is much more effi- beyond ‘handing off’ your people who adapt, translate, and cient for application developers themselves to test software for international validate that their code is properly international- code to localizers. markets) to function as a well- ized, rather than handing it off to the localization oiled machine. team. The good news is that this validation process is not nearly as painful as it used to be. Integrate localization into your source- There are now automated tools available, along 2.control and build systems. Sit down with with recognized best practices such as pseudo- your localization team (which can mean a third- localization testing. party translation company, along with internal project managers) and sketch out a plan to inte- Implement globalization guidelines. grate localized products into your source-control 5.Your localization team and language service build processes. The greater your urge to push providers will jump at the chance to work with you back, the more this discussion needs to happen. to create guidelines and best practices for develop- The solutions you devise will help various teams ers to follow in future projects. Engage them to work together toward common goals as part of a educate newly hired developers and acquired unified development process that integrates teams to prevent reinventing the wheel with every international requirements into your products localization project. from Day 1. To mature into a globalized company, you must move beyond “handing off” your code to localizers. Read this story on Treat your original language as just At some point, all players—including the original sdtimes.com 3.another language. Software product design product and user experience designers—must join and development at most companies is biased together to figure out how to work the most effi- toward a single-language product deliverable ciently. Your international customers, who may process. The fact that product deliverables (soft- eventually generate significant portions of your ware, help, documentation, Web content and so revenue, are depending on you. z SDT297 page 59_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:18 PM Page 59

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60 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Analyst View BY VIVIAN BROWN Make hackathons a win-win

Vivian Brown is a he clock is ticking down. A small team—a cou- Some come in search of prizes, while others want to researcher at Forrester Tple of developers and a single designer—hud- build a prototype and promote their app in front of Research. dles around laptops, rushing to put the finishing an audience. Many go to play with new technology touches on an application user interface. They and socialize with other developers. In fact, a recent haven’t slept all night. As the morning light filters Forrester survey found that 71% of developers into the San Francisco event center, 25 teams work spend their own time developing personal or side side by side to “hack” together new and innovative projects not related to their day jobs. Enjoyment of apps in a single weekend. This may not sound like programming and a desire to learn new technolo- your typical app development workflow—and gies were the top two reasons they cited. that’s the point. Think about what types of developers you’re When done right, hackathons are a proving aiming for, and adjust the marketing and budget to ground for new ideas and a chance to position your match. A good is similar to a good bar or organization as a technical leader by engaging in the club on a Friday night: Aim for a crowd that’s not social coding movement. Leading enterprises, so large that individual developers will feel lost or including well-known brands like 7-Eleven, Home cramped, but not so small that it’s a boring scene. Depot and Walgreens, are already joining the trend Provide clear guidelines to participants by hosting or sponsoring major hackathon events. ahead of time. Hackathons based around a spe- In fact, Salesforce.com recently hosted a million- cific design goal work best when the sponsoring dollar hackathon (the largest prize organization provides guidelines to participants. The weeks after a hackathon in hackathon history) at its annual Distribute a design brief before the event that lists matter just as much Dreamforce conference. The specific information about business goals and motivation was clear: A heft prize defines rules and constraints. Steph Habif, a as the ones before and generates media buzz and jump- behavior designer and lead organizer of the Aetna starts third-party development on design challenge, recently told us, “The narrower during the event itself. their new mobile platform. the requirements given up front, the better the Unfortunately, the results were quality of prototypes we got.” less than stellar. What Salesforce.com hoped would In addition, hosts should be clear about what impress potential developers backfired into a storm happens after the hackathon. Who owns the ideas of bad press, leading the company to name a second that were generated? How will they be put into winner—and award a second million-dollar prize. use? If any ideas get picked up for development, It’s no secret that developers’ time is valuable. If follow up with developers to let them know what you use hackathons as a source of low-cost labor, became of their designs. participants will walk away, feeling they have been Follow through after the hackathon. The taken advantage of. To get hackathons right, hosts weeks after an event matter just as much as the ones need to make sure that the event is a win for every- before and during the event itself. You should view one involved, including those who leave without a this period as a golden opportunity for measure- prize. In new research, my colleagues and I outline ment and improvement. For example, look at met- four keys to a successful hackathon event: rics like the number of people joining your develop- Start with a budget of US$10,000, and er community, API calls, and apps going live. revise to your circumstances. Hackathons attract Hackathons are an especially good tool to stimu- developers who love to compete. Hosts should late the creative juices of developers, in a social con- make sure the atmosphere is competitive and fun, text that fosters problem-solving and risk-taking due Read this story on with plenty of entertainment and opportunities to to a low cost of failure. In fact, companies should sdtimes.com socialize. In addition to food, other expenses to con- approach a hackathon as the developer equivalent sider include entertainment, security, space and fur- of an executive strategy retreat or a musicians’ jam niture rentals, and marketing and promotion. session. Outsiders can bring a fresh perspective to Aim for a hackathon that’s just the right size. business challenges, as well as give firms an outside- Participants join hackathons for a variety of reasons. in view of their products and organization. z SDT297 page 61_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:15 PM Page 61

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62 SD Times January 2014 www.sdtimes.com Industry Watch BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN A matter of trust

David Rubinstein is ight technology companies last month sent a Even so, Main said that solution was too compli- editor-in-chief of SD Times. Eletter to U.S. President Barack Obama to cated to become mainstream. “If you’re going to push for legislation to scale back the amount of click on the OK OK [popup permission boxes]— data government agencies can gather, to help going back to your saying people are just resigned restore trust in the government as well as a meas- to it—well I want that app. I’m not going to read ure of personal privacy. what the permission are, I’m just going to click OK. But it’s not just the government that’s grabbing So we need something really simple.” our personal information. More and more, regular Graphite Software’s approach is to create buck- old consumer applications are asking for more per- ets to separate apps and data into places where mission to drill through your information. This is control can be better maintained. “It’s not fine- even exacerbated by our personal relationship with grained control, more of a macro control,” Main our devices, which led virtualization startup Graphite said. “Sometimes we talk about it as a room...you Software CEO Alec Main to remark, “We spend have your kitchen, you have your media room, your more time with our devices than with our wives.” bathroom at your house. When you’re in your This relationship has fueled the workplace bathroom, that’s fine, you don’t put your bathroom BYOD phenomenon, in which workers tell their in your kitchen. You live your life in different companies which devices they want to use. In the spaces already.” past, companies would assign walkie-talkies or other To create separate spaces, some companies take communicators to all workers so a virtualization solution. Those, Main asserted, are When apps on a phone device they could control what data was too heavy for mobile devices in terms of perform- start requesting too much on them and how it was used. ance and memory usage. So Graphite Software has But with the proliferation of created what it calls service-level virtualization that personal data, then things devices today, people want to use is built directly into Android and lets users create what they’re comfortable with different containers (or spaces, as Graphite calls are getting out of hand. everywhere they are. They want them) on the device. Main said, “You can have as a convergence of work and per- many spaces as you want because it’s very light- sonal applications on their devices, if for no other weight. You can delegate management of those reason than to reduce the number of devices they spaces to a third party such as your enterprise IT, have to carry around all day. And while companies or you can create your own spaces on the phone. are doing a commendable job of protecting their “If you do that, you can now segregate apps into sensitive data on worker devices, these same solu- different groups. You can put all your gaming apps tions do not protect consumer data nearly as well. and accounts into one place, you can have an open “It’s not about malware,” Main explained. “It’s space that’s for your kids so you can share your not about slowing it down or running bots. It’s about device. You can also have a personal space for your- legitimate apps sitting in app stores that you can self. And then you can also delegate a portion of it download that are trolling through your contacts. to enterprise IT, and they can enforce their own “We’ve all had those experiences. It’s amazing policies, but only on their space. Not on your space with LinkedIn, right? You have LinkedIn and sud- and not on your data. They can’t see your data denly it’s saying, ‘Do you want to connect with this either. It’s really isolated. One space can’t access guy?’ And you’re like, ‘Who IS that guy?’ It’s like another space in any way.” somebody you had one e-mail with 10 years ago and In the end, for people to use these applications now it’s asking if you want to connect with the guy.” and devices, it’s a matter of trust. Most of us are Read this story on One indicator of the importance device users resigned to giving up some privacy for things we sdtimes.com place on privacy is the kerfuffle over Google’s want on the Web, because some personal data is removal of the AppOps privacy settings software, required for that. But Main maintains—and I con- which it says it inadvertently included with cur—that when apps on a phone device start Android 4.3 but removed in 4.4.2. Google said this requesting too much personal data, things are get- is because the software wasn’t fully baked. ting out of hand. This time, it’s personal. z SDT297 Full page ads 41-64_Layout 1 12/19/13 3:09 PM Page 63

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2 • March 31-April 2, 2014 • BOSTON • www.BigDataTechCon.com Check out this list of classes and tutorials!

Full-day Tutorials: Untangling the Relationship Hairball With a Graph Database Big Data Engineering Practice Building Your Own Facebook Graph Search with Cypher and Neo4j Hadoop: A One-Day, Hands-On Crash Course From Big Data to Smart Data Introduction to Neo4j — A Deep Dive Half-day Tutorials: More classes Graph Database Use Cases Analyzing Big Data with Hive being added every day! Introduction to , Parts I & II Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Databases Check BigDataTechCon.com Analyzing Tweets with HBase, Parts I and II Data Transfer Tools for Hadoop For Updates Introduction to MapReduce Extracting Big Data from the Internet Using AWS Enterprise-Grade Security for and Hadoop Using Cooperative Analytic Processing to Unleash Your Analytics Getting Started with Cassandra Root Causes: Fixing Big Data Quality Problems Before They Start Hadoop Programming with Scalding K Means Clustering Algorithm Using Hadoop in OpenStack NoSQL for SQL Professionals How to Build Enterprise Data Apps with Cascading Probabilistic Graphical Models with Factorie Cascading Lingual Shows How SQL Can Save your On-and-Off Thinking in HBase: Developing Big Data Solutions Using HBase Relationship with Hadoop 75-minute Technical Classes: Selecting the Right Big Data Tool for the Right Job and Making De-Bugging Hive with Hadoop in the Cloud Them Work for You Introduction to Topological Data Analysis Real-Time Hadoop Building an Intelligent Real-Time Notification System Extending Your Data Infrastructure with Hadoop That Scales Application Architectures with Hadoop: Putting the Pieces Getting Started with R and Hadoop, Parts I and II Together Through Example Implementing Real-time Analytics With Advanced Schema Design using Hbase Metadata Management: The Emerging Big Data Discipline H20 for Small Data Building a Big Data Recommendation Engine on Hadoop Bridging the Gap, OLTP and Real-Time Analytics in a Big Data World High Availability — Apache Hadoop

“A lot of very interesting topics, speakers, and attendees. “Big Data TechCon is all about Big Data and its technology. Definitely worth the trip. ” You can download a lot of knowledge and information – Brian Crucitti, Developer, Open Software Integrators at this conference. ” – Edgar Ho, Data Scientist, Salesforce.com 3 • March 31-April 2, 2014 • BOSTON • www.BigDataTechCon.com Big Data Gets Real at Big Data TechCon!

Click to watch the video and find out why HOW did past attendees like you should go to Big Data TechCon! Big Data TechCon? Dear Colleague,

Big Data is affecting all of us and may well be the future of computing as we know it. Companies and IT professionals who make the most of this new field are sure to prosper over the next 5-10 years. Many con - ferences exist to trumpet the potential and fan the hype surrounding Big Data. But until now, there has been no confer - ence that teaches you HOW to do it.

Big Data TechCon is the HOW-TO conference for Big Data. Featuring practical tutorials and more than 45 technical classes to choose from, Big Data “Big Data TechCon has knowledgeable speakers to TechCon is the biggest, most info-packed, most help you get a general understanding of the concepts practical HOW-TO Big Data conference in the and to help you decide which direction to take. world. No hype. All tech, all the time. What else ” makes Big Data TechCon special? – Ernie deVenecia, CIO & VP of IT, CompuSystems Ted Bahr Conference Chairman • Most of our speakers have been thoroughly vet - ted using evaluations from attendees at previous Big Data TechCons on the quality of information presented as well as the ability to state it clearly and produce clear takeaways that you can apply in your business today.

• You can pull together your own custom conference by choosing from up 5-6 classes in any given time-slot. Whether it’s a deep dive on Hadoop, a thorough introduction to MongoDB, intensive classes on data analytics or machine learning, you put together the conference that works best for YOU. “The technical tutorials and interaction between the • Network with other technical Big Data professionals like yourself. attendees and speakers was great. It’s the perfect Most of our attendees are software and data architects, software devel - place for data scientists to explore and learn. ” opers and engineers, data scientists, and business and data analysts facing the same challenges as you. Plus, there are chances outside of – Muni Xu, Data Engineer, Cisco the classroom to meet and talk further with our expert speakers.

• Extra events for more networking: receptions, lunches, our ice cream social and the Women in Big Data Luncheon.

• Check out cutting-edge technologies and solutions for Big Data in our exhibit hall and round out your 3-day experience.

Whether you are looking at dozens of terabytes or hundreds of petabytes, from Avro to ZooKeeper, Big Data TechCon has you covered!

See you in Boston! “GO! You’ll get great “side” discussions with very technically-savvy speakers. ” Ted Bahr – Geoff Liakos, Solutions Architect Conference Chairman 4 • March 31-April 2, 2014 • BOSTON • www.BigDataTechCon.com How To Register

Register online at www.BigDataTechCon.com Big Data TechCon 2014 will be held On or After Register By Jan. 24 Feb. 21 March 21 March 21 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge Three–Day $1,095 $1,145 $1,195 $1,495 Conference SAVE SAVE SAVE $400 $350 $300 Exhibit Hall Only FREE FREE FREE FREE

REGISTRATION INCLUSIONS Three-Day Conference Only Registration Includes: • Admission to sessions and classes on March 31, April 1 and April 2 Special Discounted Rates • Admission to keynotes Room rates for Big Data TechCon attendees are • Admission to Exhibit Hall US$199 per night for single/double occupancy. This rate is available from March 28, 2014 • Admission to all special events, including the Networking Reception (check-in) through April 4, 2014 (check-out). • Coffee breaks and lunch where indicated ROOMS FOR THE REDUCED RATE ARE LIMITED – BOOK NOW FOR THE BEST RATE! Exhibit Hall Only Registration Includes: Register • Admission to Exhibit Hall on April 1 and April 2 Early • Admission to Networking Reception on April 1 and SAVE! • Admission to Keynote sessions Subscribe to FREE! Get the latest news, news analysis and commentary about mastering Special Discounts Big Data! Big Data TechReport is an electronic HTML newsletter that You may combine one of these special discounts with the is FREE and delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday. Early Registration pricing to save even more! Whether you are a software architect, database developer, business analyst or data scientist, if you GROUP EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS are working with Big Data, you need to subscribe to Group discounts will be given automati - Personnel employed by or attending Big Data TechReport. cally if you register three or more people educational institutions can get a $100 at once. You can also contact Matt discount off the Three-Day Conference Be the first to find out: Chyriwski at [email protected] price by using the code EDU. • The latest news about to receive the $100/person discount if Hadoop, Map/Reduce, NoSQL, your group is unable to register at the USER GROUPS graph databases, Cassandra, Hive, same time. Contact him also for special Contact Stacy Burris, Pig and more! discounts for groups of 10 or more. [email protected] to see if your • Reports of trends and new uses for Big Data methodologies group is eligible for a discount. • Learn tips, tricks and techniques that will make you your GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES company’s Big Data expert! Government, Federal, State and Local NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS • Discover new ways to analyze your Big Data for operational Government employees can receive an Personnel employed by non-profit efficiency and predictability. additional $100 off the Three-Day organizations can get a $100 discount • PLUS ! The super cool Linkapalooza column Conference price. Enter code GOV in off the Full Event Passport price by using discount code field. SAM registered the code NONPROFIT. indicates that we are listed in the SUBSCRIBE TODAY primary supplier database for the to keep up with everything that’s happening Federal Government. in the fast-moving world of Big Data! www.sdtimes.com/content/bigdatatechreport/index.aspx