Two years ago, VMware purchased WaveMaker and its technology for simplifying the construction of enterprise Java applications and made it part of its SpringSource business unit. As GigaOM’s Derrick Harris wrote at the time, Rod Johnson, who was then head of that business, said Wavemaker made sense because:

” … applications developed with it actually are Spring applications. That means VMware can tightly align WaveMaker and Spring developments to make WaveMaker an even more fulfilling experience, and after simple applications are built using WaveMaker, an organization’s Spring developers can go in and code away to make it work even better. When it comes to developing Java applications, VMware now has something for almost everybody, and it all works together at some level.”

The mystery here is that SpringSource and associated technologies were spun off to the VMware-EMC-founded Pivotal startup. Why WaveMaker was not included is unclear to me. I’ve pinged Pivotal for comment and will update with a response. And…. here’s that response from a Pivotal spokeswoman:

“Pivotal is focused on bringing a new platform to market based on Spring, Cloud Foundry and Hadoop. We have significant investments in these technologies, and believe that WaveMaker customers are best served by a dedicated effort from Pramati.”

Pramati co-founder and president Vijay Pullur said former Wavemaker exec Michael Harper is with his company, which is expanding into cloud infrastructure. WaveMaker technologies could play a roll in an upcoming cloud venture, he said. We’ll be talking about projects like this and what’s new in cloud computing at Structure 2013 in San Francisco in June.

According to the press release announcing the news:

 ”WaveMaker applications are cloud-ready, highly scalable, multi-device, and backed by a strong developer community that has doubled to 35,000 active monthly users over the last two years. With its long heritage of mission-critical Java application development, Pramati expects to accelerate this growth going forward.”

In other words: stay tuned.

This story was updated at 7:04 p.m. PST with Pivotal comment.

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Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller

As of now, Apprenda will also support Java, says CEO Sinclair Schuller. It’s not really a huge surprise, even though Schuller was a vocal proponent of single-langauge PaaSes . Last May, he told GigaOM if he were forced to choose a second language to support, Java would be it.

Well the time has come. “Our thesis has been we want to be the enterprise PaaS and for that we’ll tackle the two languages that make up 80 percent of the [corporate] application portfolio,” Schuller said in a recent interview. “Some companies are 60 percent/40 percent Java, some 60 percent/40 percent .NET but Java and .Net are always in there.”

Apprenda counts Honeywell and Diebold as reference customers and now adds JP MorganChase to the list. The country’s largest bank has decided to develop, deploy and maintain all its custom .NET and Java applications on Apprenda. At a time when many of the multi-language public PaaSes have a hard time naming real customers, this is something of a coup.

These customers use Apprenda for applications for handling  patient relationship management, oncology treatment, mortgage management, inventory management and predictive analytics for retail and other verticals, Schuller said.

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MacRumors reports on how Apple did it:

Apple has achieved this by updating its “Xprotect.plist” blacklist to require a minimum of an as-yet unreleased 1.7.0_10-b19 version of Java 7. With the current publicly-available version of Java 7 being 1.7.0_10-b18, all systems running Java 7 are failing to pass the check initiated through the anti-malware system built into OS X.

Apple stopped developing Java for OS X in late 2010 and no longer includes it as pre-installed software on new Macs. Users who want the plug-in can still download the software separately; only those who have Java 7 are affected by the security threat.

Image courtesy of Flickr user [spcbrass].

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Of course, as a commenter on a Hacker News item, pointed out, numbers can be sliced and diced many ways. If you look at Indeed.com’s chart showing “absolute” number of job postings, it’s clear that demand for Java skills reigns supreme still.

“The fastest growing languages also happen to be the languages with the least jobs,” wrote commenter Zandana. “I imagine Scala’s growth will tail off a long time before it can compete in [the] sheer number of jobs with JavaScript or Java.”

There’s little doubt that the use of Scala, the brainchild of Martin Odersky, is on the rise. Twitter and LinkedIn are big Scala users. One advantage is it enables Java programmers — and there are millions of them — to keep using familiar libraries and develop web-scale applications.

But then again, these charts only show what parameters are put in. If you add Objective-C to the mix, as another Hacker News commenter pointed out, you get still another view of what’s going on.

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Odersky is something of a superstar in the Java programming world. He wrote Javac, the most widely used Java compiler, and now he’s the force behind the fast-growing Scala programming language. That language makes it easier for developers to code for “parallelism,”  which is what allows tens of thousands of people to use an application at the same time without crashing it.

In the pre-cloud, client-server era, you might have had a couple hundred  – or maybe thousand –  users hammering on a server-based application. But they accessed it from company-issued PCs, so programmers could assume a finite number of users and make sure they had enough server power and bandwidth to support that number.

That all goes away in today’s world, where millions of people use popular applications at the same time. How many smartphone users hit Twitter during a major sporting event? Or on election day? Your guess is as good as mine. It is that scale that parallelism enables and that Scala helps make easier to program.

Why Scala?

Up until a few years ago, to make applications perform better you installed a faster processor. But we’ve pretty much maxed out the speed limit for individual chips. So best way to get better performance now is to use chips with multiple cores, all operating at a high speed, and to spread the workload among them. Here’s an admittedly simplistic analogy: Instead of packing multiple tons of cargo onto a single huge freighter, you divvy the load up among an array of smaller boats that can move faster.

The key is to have a captain who knows how to take advantage of that expanded fleet — or, to bring the analogy back to the tech world, an application that knows how to take advantage of those multiple cores. Instead of writing a program that runs on a single core, you have to write a program that’s smarter about deploying the workloads among many cores.

“Single-core performance is running out of steam, and you need to parallelize everything,” Odersky told me in a recent interview. You do that through what’s known as functional programming. Ray Ozzie, the former chief software architect for Microsoft and no slouch when it comes to coding, likens functional programming to spreadsheets where each cell in the spreadsheet containing that formula acts as an independent processor working concurrently to keep the spreadsheet updated. It’s a parallel computing system enabled by functional programming, Ozzie says via email.

Scala works with Java and compiles in the JVM, which is significant because many, many of the world’s enterprise applications are written in Java. It’s not a stretch to say there are millions of Java programmers (Oracle, which now owns Java, claims 9 million.)  With Scala these programmers can keep using their Java libraries, frameworks and the JVM while also taking advantage of functional programming, which tends to be less verbose than Java code.

That brevity leads to more compact, elegant software compared to older-style imperative programming. With imperative programming, variables can evolve over time, while in functional programming variables keep the same value. The notion of shifting variables poses a problem in a parallel process where one part of the program executes based on an older value that has since changed.

Scala gains steam

In September, Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady used data from Github and Stackoverflow to show Scala on its way to becoming a top-tier language, along with Java, Javascript, PHP, and Python. Other functional languages such as Erlang and Haskel have their admirers but their user base isn’t growing as fast, according to this data.

Odersky, a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, is also co-founder and CTO of Typesafe, a San Francisco startup that promotes the use of Scala and related Akka middleware, especially in the enterprise. Typesafe customers include LinkedIn and the Dutch Border Patrol, which uses a Scala-based application to photograph every car coming into the country and quickly know — based on the license plate — whether to stop that car or not. Twitter and FourSquare are also Scala users. Odersky also teaches a Coursera class on Scala that drew an astounding 45,000 registrants.

“I studied with lots of amazing people at MIT, but very few successfully cross that academic-to-business divide, and Martin has,” says Bill Kaiser, a partner with Greylock Partners, a Typesafe investor. Odersky’s ongoing interaction with students allows him to stay involved in what’s new in programming, adds Mark Brewer, CEO of Typesafe, who jokes that Odersky spends about 50 hours a week on Typesafe business and another 50 teaching.

The programming pantheon

Those two and others make the case that Odersky belongs in the same pantheon of programming gods as James Gosling, the father of Java itself; Niklaus Wirth, who wrote Pascal (and with whom Odersky studied); Anders Hejlsberg, of Turbo Pascal fame; and Bjarne Stoustrup, who wrote C++ and other languages.

Rod Johnson, the co-founder of Springsource, now part of VMware, and now a director of Typesafe, says Martin “absolutely” belongs in this august company. “Considering prior art in each case, I would rate Scala as a more impressive — and original — achievement than Java or C# and on a par with C++,” Johnson says via email. “The way Scala successfully mixes functions and objects; the way in which it resolves the multiple inheritance problem; its effective type inference; and its interoperability with Java are all particularly impressive.”

The next frontier

Odersky said the explosion of mobile devices continues to challenge programmers. While new languages and tools like Scala helped, more needs to be done to deliver software that keeps up with the new hardware. For one thing, it needs to be much easier for non-programming geniuses to both write and troubleshoot such software.

“If you want to write a multi-threaded application now it’s still nightmarishly difficult. There are lots of mistakes that are hard to detect. We have to make programming these kinds of applications feasible for everyone, not just experts and that is very hard,” he says.

For more on Odersky and Scala, check out this video of a talk he gave at Intel.

Intel hosts Dr. Martin Odersky presenting Scala 2.10 from Typesafe on Vimeo.

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As WibiData product manager Devjit Chakravarti told me during a recent call, KijiSchema essentially “takes the ‘No’ out of NoSQL.” What he means is that although NoSQL databases such as HBase are lauded in part because they can store unstructured data and don’t require rigid rules for data formatting like relational databases do, having some structure is actually necessary once you want to do meaningful analysis on it. That’s why some commercial products, such as Drawn to Scale’s Spire and Splice Machine’s Splice SQL Engine, already have built functional SQL databases on top of HBase.

Kimball speaking at Structure: Data in 2012
(c) 2012 Pinar Ozger. pinar@pinarozger.com

“If you can’t store data in an organized way, you can’t analyze it effectively,” WibiData Co-Founder and CTO Aaron Kimball explained. KijiSchema isn’t part of WibiData’s secret sauce around predictive analytics for user data, he added, but nothing gets done without it.

Here’s how Kimball describes how KijiSchema manages data in a blog post announcing the project:

“KijiSchema gives developers the ability to easily store both structured and unstructured data within HBase using Avro serialization. It supports a variety of rich schema features, including complex, compound data types, HBase column key and time-series indexing, as well cell-level evolving schemas that dynamically encode version information.

“KijiSchema promotes the use of entity-centric data modeling, where all information about a given entity (user, mobile device, ad, product, etc.), including dimensional and transaction data, is encoded within the same row. This approach is particularly valuable for user-based analytics such as targeting, recommendations, and personalization.”

Kiji resides in the lower left section

The coolest part for HBase developers or prospective HBase developers, however, might be that KijiSchema isn’t just code but is already pre-packaged any ready to deploy. WibiData has created what it calls the Kiji BentoBox — “a fully-functional HBase mini-cluster with KijiSchema on your machine with minimal configuration in under 15 minutes” — that’s available for download on Github.

KijiSchema is also part of a broader Kiji framework for HBase that WibiData plans to open source over the next year or so. People perceive HBase as being complicated to set up and having a steep learning curve, Kimball said, and his teams wants to make it more accessible and lower the barrier for getting started. The ultimate goal is to make the types of HBase applications that folks at Facebook, eBay and other large web shops are building something that any developer can do.

WibiData’s Omer Trajman, formerly VP of technology solutions at Cloudera, describes the ultimate Kiji framework as being akin what the Spring framework if for Java. Despite its complexity, “there are also tens of thousands of developers who have been able to figure [HBase] out,” he said, but learning it might take weeks of intensive training on learning the low-level guts of the Hadoop Distributed File System and other stuff. Why learn to build an enterprise Java application from scratch, Trajman asked, when you can just use Spring?

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Continuous integration of changes to software code becomes more critical as dev teams get bigger and more dispersed. Jenkins is an open-source tool that pulls in all those changes, centralizes them, and goes through changes continuously to verify code quality. The goal is to make both the development and quality assurance (QA) of code faster and more efficient — with fewer round trips.

Towards that end, Google is pointing GAE developers to Cloudbee’s Jenkins implementation. (Cloudbees offers a Java-specific Platform as a Service (PaaS).)

What tools like Jenkins do is replace chaos, said Ryan Campbell, software developer at Cloudbees. “Any time someone on the team changes something, Jenkins will check it out, test it and then email the developers if they’ve broken anything. Now [with] the App Engine integration, if the tests look good it will automatically deploy the code in GAE — probably in a test environment for your QA team to look at.”

According to the Google App Engine blog:

Jenkins will monitor your projects’ source code for any changes, run the necessary builds and tests, and notify your team of any problems – or automatically deploy the application to Google App Engine if everything looks good. This process helps to prevent the deployment of broken code, and gives everyone a central record of what changes went into each deployment.

Developers can sign up at appengine.cloudbees.com using their GAE account and can continue using whatever source code service — GitHub, Cloudbees’ own Git and SVN servers as needed, according to the blog.

Jenkins competes with Hudson in open-source continuous integration. Other CI competitors include Atlassian’s Bamboo and JetBrains’ TeamCity.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Leszek Glasner

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Typesafe, based in Menlo Park, CA,  is positioning both the Scala language and related Akka software stack as top-tier tools for both web and enterprise development because they attack two key issues: The language makes it easier to write code to run on multiple cores and Akka eases the creation of applications that run across multiple servers. A third piece of the Typesafe puzzle is Play, a Ruby-on-Rails-style framework.

In a statement, Johnson said:

“Today’s computing environments are moving towards multicore hardware and cloud computing workloads. Typesafe is strategically positioned to provide innovate solutions with its modern Scala and Akka-based software stack and developer tools for the next wave of applications.”

SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson

Update: Typesafe co-founder and chief architect Martin Odersky wrote the current version of the  original Java compiler for Sun Microsystems, and is something of a superstar for programmers. His Coursera class on the language drew a whopping 45,000 registrants and he will be talking about the upcoming Scala release at JavaOne this week in San francisco. For more on Scala Release 2.10, see this InfoWorld report. Typesafe also  launched a mobile app Friday for Android and iPhones for Scala developers going into the show

Last June, Typesafe brought in new CEO, Mark Brewer, former VP of business operations for VMware’s Cloud Application Platform,  to drive its enterprise push.

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The new Heroku Enterprise for Java supports the latest Java Development Kits (JDKs), adds native support for the popular Eclipse integrated development environment and adds enterprise support that includes guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs.)

It won’t be alone in this Java PaaS fray. Red Hat — which owns the JBoss Java middleware franchise — is making a big Java PaaS play with Openshift.  Cloudbees is a Java PaaS and even Microsoft Azure supports Java.

Heroku which started out 5 years ago as a Ruby-focused PaaS, is popular among Web developers designing customer- facing apps. It has since added other languages – including for some Java support — over the years. What’s happening here, however is a major endorsement of the full Java ecosystem which is key in enterprise accounts where Salesforce.com’s CRM software as a service (SaaS)  offering is popular.

The importance of embracing Java

“We looked at Java and saw what you need to deploy Java web apps — Tomcat, SQL databases– you always need some sort of caching layer for session management and all those pieces take a lot of work to put together even with the modern technologies available. Heroku Enterprise for Java provides this all out of the box — the full Java stack provisioned for the enterprise cloud app that you would normally deploy on premise,” Oren Teich COO of Heroku told me recently.

Heroku will charge customers $1,000 per production application per month. “You pay one price for the whole set up, the production app, the sandbox and development environment,” Jesper Joergensen, senior director of product for Heroku said in a recent interview

Since Salesforce bought Heroku in January 2010 for $212 million, developers both inside and outside of big businesses —  have used these platforms like it to build and test applications. But their corporate masters are less enthused about putting production corporate applications on these platforms. That’s something Salesforce.com, Red Hat, Microsoft (with Azure) and others are trying to change.

Al Hilwa, IDC program director for application development  said Salesforce is doing a lot with this new “Winter” release of its platform — broadening it out to include essential enterprise-class services including s file storage and identity management. Bringing 5-year-old Heroku more into the fold is part of that effort.

The company is also accommodating touch devices with its HTML5 Salesforce Touch framework. “Finally, we are seeing [Salesforce.com] bolster the Java capabilities to support real Java workloads. This is a crucial point for Heroku to run a larger mix of enterprise Java workloads, namely existing enterprise Java applications,” he said.

Salesforce’s two PaaS problem

One nagging issue for the company is that it’s fielding two PaaSes – Force.com which supports the company’s proprietary APEX language and the polyglot Heroku. The expectation is that it will bring those offerings together over time. For now, developers will be able to use Force.com’s new Canvas tool to integrate third-party applications into that environment.  With Canvas “you can now write Ruby or Java apps that use Force.com metadata and context,” Hilwa said.

Another issue: Heroku now runs only on Amazon infrastructure. As big and powerful as that platform is, it’s been known to go down and take customers — including Heroku and Netflix — with it.  Other, smaller PaaSes like Appfog, preach a multi-cloud strategy for that reason. Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst with Rishidot, said Heroku needs to follow suit. “I’ve been pushing them a long time on this [Amazon Web Services] thing,” he said. In his view, Heroku needs to stay on Amazon but also move to other infrastructure including Salesforce.com infrastructure.

A few months ago Heroku’s then-CEO Byron Sebastian told me that Heroku is always evaluating options and will do what’s best for customers. Sebastian left in August, but Teich reiterated his message, saying Heroku will have more to say on this topic in a few months.

“You don’t come to Heroku because you want Amazon … We firmly believe uptime is critical and irrespective of the underlying infrastructure you need to know that we will be accountable for our uptime,” Teich said.

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