links for 2010-12-15: Microsoft at crossroads; OpenJDK for OS X; Java lawsuits; Oracle Cloud Office

• Microsoft: A big ship at crossroads; What else is new? - I don't think there is any question they'll survive, the titanic references are off, but will they flourish in the new markets?
  
• Oracle and Apple Announce OpenJDK Project for OSX - I missed this when it was announced, but is great news.
  
• Oracle mobile Java licensing suit boomerangs - Can't we all just get along?  This this also.
  
• Oracle Announces Oracle Cloud Office and Oracle Open Office 3.3 - It is great that it is "announced", but they previewed it at Open World.  Where can we actually see it?  Only mention is in the datasheet where it says to call to get a demo account.  Not looking for mass adoption I guess.
  

links for 2010-08-20: Ellison to hire Hurd?; Laptop reliability survey; Google thwarted by California; Oracle vs Google on Java; Cloud data offers intelligence; Ubuntu advantages over Windows and OS X

• Mark Hurd to Oracle? Don't be surprised - An interesting idea.
  
• Acer makes the shoddiest laptops, say IT professionals - From those they surveyed, I'd agree Acer is at the bottom of the list.  It is interesting to see HP and Dell with high percentages in both the best and worse categories.
• Google accuses California of rigging bidding process for e-mail contract - I personally find Google's labels and search preferable to traditional e-mail clients.  Let's hope California didn't have a closed mind on the subject.
  
• Charles Nutter's thoughts on Oracle vs Google - A great read if you have the time.  If you don't, Stephen O'Grady's thoughts are good as well (and shorter).
• Intuit: Small businesses slow hiring; increase pay and hours worked - Another great example of how Cloud based services (Intuit's Online Payroll service) offer an opportunity to use volumes of data to offer intelligence.
  
• Ubuntu's two big advantages over Windows and Mac - Jason makes very good points.  I doubt it is going to cause a major shift to Ubuntu though...
  

Eclipse Community Survey 2010 Published; Interesting OS, app server, and open-source results

The Eclipse Community Survey 2010 is now available, and as a big fan of surveys and data, I couldn't help but dive in to take a look at what the community had to say.

First, as is the case with all surveys and data, one has to consider the audience when looking at the results to understand the context, and in this case, the survey was promoted on the eclipse.org web-site and related blogs/tweets.  It was also only available in English and 1,696 respondents completed it.  And over 50% of the respondents listed themselves as programmers.

Ok, with that out of the way, what are some of the interesting results or observations?

• Nearly 40% of developers now use Linux (32.7%) or OS X (7.9%) for their primary development OS.  The audience is clearly the reason this is much higher than you'd expect for the general desktop population, but both the Linux and OS X numbers are growing at the expense of Windows which is down 6% to 58.3% from last year.
• Linux (46%) is ahead of Windows (41%) for deployment OS.
• Sun Hotspot (69.8%) and Open JDK (21.7%) still dominate the JVM used for deployed applications.
• Scrum (15.4%) and iterative (10.9%) are the leading development methodologies.
• Hudson (21.8%) is the 3rd most used release management tool behind Ant (50.4%) and Maven (28.3%).
• There is a nearly even split among the primary types of apps being developed between RIAs (26.9%), Server-centric apps (26.9%), and desktop client apps (21.0%).
• For server frameworks, in something of a surprise given all the bashing EJBs have taken over the years, EJB (18.6%) and Spring (19.7%) use is nearly on par and ahead of Servlets (10.1%).
• It is no surprise that MySQL (31.8%) is the leading database used, but Oracle (21.6%) is not far behind and well ahead of the others.
• Tomcat (33.8%) far and away the most used app-server and disappointingly, GlassFish (2.9%) is last listed behind WebSphere, Jetty, and WebLogic.
• Nearly 60% have no plans to use the Cloud!  This is somewhat surprising given all the hubbub we are hearing about the Cloud.

What is perhaps most interesting (and gets its own paragraph, not just a bullet :)) is the section on open-source maturity.  There has been a gradual shrinking of companies that have a business model that relies on open-source and a pretty big decline in companies that use open-source and contribute back.  There is a pretty big increase in those that use open-source but don't contribute back, so it would seem that use has not declined, but engagement and collaboration with the communities has certainly suffered.  And somewhat alarming is that, while still a very small percentage, the number of companies not allowing the use of any open-source software is growing.

What does this all mean?

• I believe that the growth of non-Windows platforms for development and deployment continues although it is probably getting closer to the ultimate balance point.
• Developers continue to use and adopt new tools and technologies that enhance their productivity but are not abandoning prior technologies that have had significant improvements (EJB with Java EE 6).
• Developers are taking a pragmatic or perhaps more pessimistic approach to the Cloud and open-source.  Perhaps due to the economy and companies having to tighten their belts, use of open-source continues but there is no longer the resources to fully buy into the model and contribute back.

What do you think?

Flash Performance Issues on Mac OS X

There has been a lot of debate about the lack of Flash support on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, and part of the larger debate is that Adobe hasn't invested in Flash support on OS X sufficiently leading to performance issues on that platform.  As I use a Mac, I've suffered from some of these issues including high CPU utilization when watching video using Flash to having the fan turn on when the system is seemingly idle because a Flash applet or two in a web-page is using excessive CPU.

So, I was pleased to hear the Adobe is promising to address these performance issues in the forthcoming Flash 10.1 release.  I was more pleased to see that release candidate 2 is available and downloaded it and installed it to try things out.

For my test, I elected to compare CPU utilization of the Flash plug-in while watching a Dodger game on MLB.com.  On a side note, this service which provides the ability to watch out of market games in HD on a computer or on  many mobile devices is an awesome service and I highly recommend it.

Using the latest Flash 10.0, I observed the CPU utilization of the process running the Flash player at around 90-95%.  Good thing I have a dual core machine (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo), but it is still working pretty hard to play the streaming video.

With 10.1 RC2, I did observe a slight decrease in utilization to around 80-85%, so it has improved, and it may improve more before the final release.

But the performance is still well short of Flash on Windows it would seem as an old notebook I have with an AMD Turion 64 Mobile ML-34 at 1.8 GHz can watch the same HD stream using around 80% CPU and that is a single core machine.  For comparison, according to cpubenchmark.net the old notebook has a 437 CPU rating and the Mac is around 1400 so even using 1 core at around 700, the Mac is "using" 560 while the old PC is "using" 350, so more efficient.

Let's hope the work Adobe is doing to improve the performance of Flash on the Mac continues.

Snow Leopard is here! My initial review.

My Snow Leopard DVD arrived yesterday but I didn't have a chance to install it until this evening.

I actually did an upgrade, upgrading a MacBook Pro from 10.5, and the upgrade itself took about 45 minutes.  One strange thing was during the middle of the upgrade the screen went 90% dim and I could hardly read how much longer it would take.  But alas everything completed without a hitch and the machine rebooted.

Since one of the perks of the new OS is improved performance, I had done a few very unscientific tests on the machine prior to upgrading and then did the same tests post upgrade.  The tests I performed and timed were:

• Boot and login.
• Start NeoOffice.
• Open a simple .ods file from a fully closed NeoOffice.
• Start Safari pointed to the default apple.com page.
• Start Firefox pointed to google.com.
• Open Eclipse.
• Re-open Eclipse from fully closed.
• Transcode a .wmv video to .ogv format.

After these tests I also looked at memory usage to see where things stood.

I did perform the tests on Snow Leopard twice since I was a bit surprised by a few the first time.  Note that in each case the tests were performed in order so everything started from a fresh reboot.

Action	Leopard	Snow Leopard (1)	Snow Leopard (2)
Boot to login screen	40	33	35
Start NeoOffice	23	17	20
Open .ods in NeoOffice	10	12	9
Start Safari (apple.com)	8	5	4
Start Firefox (google.com)	8	8	6
Open Eclipse	17	36	19
Re-open Eclipse	7	7	7
Transcode WMV to OGV (wall clock)	4:52	5:14	4:51
Transcode (user time)	4:48	4:55	4:46
Free (GB)	2.43	2.03	2.14
Wired (MB)	153.5	304.4	162.8
Active (MB)	376.68	524.7	403.3
Inactive (MB)	45.21	157.3	310.7
Used (MB)	575.39	986.4	876.8
VM size (GB)	30.2	104.04	107.73
Page ins (MB)	243.07	916	224.6

• So Snow Leopard boots a little faster, but not dramatically so.  Further, on the first reboot, completing the login took about 5 seconds whereas with Leopard it was just a second or so.  The second test on Snow Leopard was in the 1-2 second range so perhaps it was just something with the very first login.
• It would appear NeoOffice itself starts a bit quicker under Snow Leopard, but opening a spreadsheet is roughly the same.  I'm not sure if anything can really be concluded here.
• Safari certainly starts quicker, I'm not sure if there is a new version that is faster or if they sneakily have it partly loaded/started behind the scenes.  Firefox took basically the same time to start but was perhaps slightly faster under Snow Leopard.
• Oddly, the first time under Snow Leopard, Eclipse took much longer to open than with Leopard.  This was the big reason I did a second test and in that one it was closer to the same time.  I'm not sure if there was something about running Java the first time or what.  In both cases re-opening Eclipse after a full close was the same time.
• Surprisingly the transcoding of the video was slower under Snow Leopard the first time.  The second time it was just about the same.
• The memory management with Snow Leopard seems to be quite a bit different as performing the exact same steps resulted in over 50% memory being used, although in the second test the bulk of this increase was inactive.  But the VM size was over 3 times greater in each case.

As I said at the beginning, not terribly scientific, but at the end of the day it appears the only noticeable improvement is in the Safari initial start time which is less than I had hoped for.  I'll certainly be reading other reviews and looking for other improvements there might be in the coming days.