Denis’ Blog

Java is a 15 years old language. And 95% of java projects still have bad productivity and many, many, many architectural pitfalls. Too much academic, too much frameworks, too much options, whatever the reasons are, it is demonstrated quite every day.

Some people help us see the light. Of course some of my beloved Java architects here .But in the outside world we can see good design and good execution. Want to be convinced that Java can be done the right way, helping fast features implementation and high scalability at the right cost? A few examples:

• Jive Forums & Clearspace from Jive Software. These guys know their stuff.
• Jira & Confluence from Atlassian
• Alfresco from…well, Alfresco
• Nuxeo 5 from..well, Nuxeo.

And there is one big, big, big site relying on Java: LinkedIn. Maybe the  fact a French designed the beast helped a lot (ok, for soccer it is over for us guys, let us dream that we are software designing the right way ). Have a look at their presentations.

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No Hibernate, Agile methodology and scalability in mind. Great stuff.

BTW: I’ve connected yesterday to Linkedin, it was down for a few minutes. You can’t have 100% availability. Except of course in PHP….. Just kidding :-p.

Microsoft and Symbian of course. Have you noticed the mindshare that Android and the iPhone took in, well, a few months? Pretty sure it will last. That’s a good news. I am still waiting for my Linux based, 3G, dual card and open sourced mobile phone. And I feel it is not that far away…

IBM announced today the acquisition of Cognos. It has been a long time rumor, since Cognos was the obvious missing link in the BI offer of IBM. IBM and Cognos has been long term partners and the acquisition of BO by SAP has probably accelerated the deal.

What is really interesting is that this deal is closing the loop: no more pure player in the Business Intelligence field. Well, almost. Informatica will be the last one (if acquired). No more proprietary software vendors. Even if their offer is very young and immature, I am eager to see how will Pentaho or Greenplum benefits from that convergence?

The software market has been concentrating around the TOP 4: IBM, SAP, Microsoft & Oracle. They are now ruling the IT field. It is pretty sure for everyone that the open source pure players will not change that. I am not convinced. The market is more and more commoditized. The Top 4 will have to sacrifice sooner or later their cash caws: application server, Core ERP, CRM, databases, portal. Let’s see how they will handle that.