But Dyn doesn’t want to offer that to its customers; it will transform the app into a tool for devops. In other words, instead of integrating with Salesforce.com, Marketo, Google Analytics and other data sources, users will be able to bring together application-performance management data from providers such as New Relic and Compuware’s Gomez alongside analytics on domain-name server queries and big email campaigns. That sort of mobile app could make it easy for devops guys to see from home if applications are operating without issue, email campaigns are working as they should and DNS queries are going through data centers as they should and within the bounds of what customers have signed up for. If there are issues, devops should be alerted that they need to act.

The acquisition, whose terms were not disclosed, ties in nicely with website-performance analytics technology from Verelo, which Dyn also has acquired.

Cory von Wallenstein, Dyn’s chief technology officer (pictured), was the original investor in Trendslide. He will speak about upgrading infrastructure while maintaining uptime at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 20.

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Even though Instart has emerged from stealth mode, the company is keeping the technology behind its Software as a Service (SaaS) a secret for now. (It won’t say how many customers it has, either.) But suffice it to say that the Instart software won’t require any major reworking on the part of developers. “We do not impose any burden (that) you need to change your code or change development methodology,” said Manav Mital, a co-founder and the company’s CEO. “The process is very easy to come in.”

At the moment, Instart, based in Mountain View, Calif., is aimed primarily at web-based applications, not native apps, Mital said.

Tenaya Capital led Instart’s Series B round, alongside contributions from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and other investors. Total venture funding in Instart is now at $26 million. The new funding will help Instart add sales and marketing and also work more on their product.

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Rackspace General Counsel Alan Schoenbaum detailed the legal challenge in a blog post on Friday. You can read the details there and in its petition to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but the gist is that Rotatable sued Rackspace (as well as Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods Market and numerous other large companies) and then told Rackspace it was ready to settle the claim for $75,000, possibly less. Classic troll behavior.

And even though its USPTO challenge will end up costing much more than $75,000, Rackspace decided to stick it to Rotatable and stick up for everyone else who has developed a rotatable mobile app. Some already have been sued and others might be, and all they did was utilize a feature of the operating system their apps run on. It’s the equivalent of suing Microsoft Office users for infringement if you thought Office had infringed your patent.

As Schoenbaum explained during a phone call, this is standard operating procedure in patent troll cases. Because of a legal theory called patent exhaustion, patent holders who sue and lose or settle with and grant a license to upstream defendants (e.g., OS or device manufacturers in this case) can’t then go after downstream users such as Rackspace or Whole Foods. It’s often a lot more effective to shake down lots of those downstream users — be they individuals, small businesses or corporations — for relatively small settlements than it is to target one or two big upstream infringers.

Small businesses, especially, are often ”perfectly situated sitting ducks for lawsuits,” Schoenbaum said. However, he added, “[Rotatable] probably shouldn’t have started with us.”

Going on the offensive against trolls

This isn’t the first time a large company has decided to stick it to a patent troll in the name of justice rather than settle, though. Last week, Rackspace decided to sue a troll called Parallel Iron that claimed Rackspace committed patent infringement by using the Hadoop Distributed File System. As part of its lawsuit against Parallel Iron, Rackspace is seeking a declaratory judgment that the patents involved don’t actually relate to Hadoop — a decision that could come in handy for other Parallel Iron defendants such as Facebook, Amazon and Oracle. (IP Nav, an alleged troll associated with Parallel Iron, gives its account of the situation here.)

In 2012, Cisco, Netgear and Motorola joined forces (albeit unsuccessfully in the end) to file a federal racketeering complaint against a patent troll demanding payments from hotels and restaurants for using WiFi.

And, of course, there are some more-defensive attempts to tackle the problem of patent trolls, such as Google’s decision to pledge non-assertion for a number of patents related to its MapReduce technology. That decision essentially freed up anyone to use the processing components (but, obviously, not the storage component) of the Hadoop platform without fear of infringement claims from anybody.

Covering the Rackspace-Parallel Iron news, I suggested more large companies serious about fighting the alleged scourge of patent trolling should do exactly what Rackspace is doing with Rotatable — and it’s possible that might happen. Rackspace is attacking Rotatable thanks to a provision of recent patent reform legislation that lets third parties (like Rackspace in this case, because it’s not claiming any patent ownership) to challenge the validity of a patent based solely on the existence of prior art. Prior art that would refute the novelty of a patent has historically been difficult to track down, but new tools such as Google Patent Search are making it an easier process.

In this case, Schoenbaum told me, the amount of prior art available made it a perfect opportunity to take advantage of the new law.

One of many pieces of evidence in the Rackspace petition.

However, he noted, just because the recent patent reform legislation was a step forward, that doesn’t mean the system is perfect. Patent examiners are still overloaded with applications, and in difficult-to-parse software and business-process patents there’s probably a bias to grant rather than deny. He’d also like to (and is optimistic he will) see Congress take up patent reform once again to give end-users (like mobile developers in this case, or WiFi users in the Cisco case) immunity against patent infringement suits.

Whatever happens in Washington, though, it appears Rackspace will keep on taking the fight to patent trolls. Just like Red Hat before it, new open source champion Rackspace wants to do what it can to defend the open source community, Schoenbaum said. “We want to start a movement.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Denys Prykhodov.

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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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