ReadWriteWeb

In June I participated in a Forrester webinar hosted by Glenn O'Donnell called
"DevOps: Friction-Free Collaboration for Development and Operations" DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is quite the buzzword now, and the discussion yielded many attempts to define it. One thing we agreed on: Unfortunately development and operations are two organizational entities that tend not to get along very well. In this post I'll explain why DevOps represents a mental shift from "us versus them" to a more cohesive, results-oriented approach.

A few weeks in advance of Microsoft's first technical revelations about the structure of Windows 8, the company's Windows group president Steven Sinofsky yesterday revealed the names of the new operating system's various design committees in a post inaugurating the new "Building Windows 8" blog.

But given the opportunity today, the company declined all comment for ReadWriteWeb on what many of the committees' names actually mean, or why certain groups appear to have been given autonomous assignments. It's more than just a nomenclatural issue: With Windows 7, the group called "Color" ended up being the fundamental design group that helped redesign the Taskbar and introduce the jump list, two of Win7's most appreciated features.

For companies looking to develop and then test, stage and run a Drupal site, Acquia's hosted Dev Cloud service provides an affordable solution to either on-premises hosting of your own Drupal server or going with a general hosting service who may not be as familiar with the oddities of setting up your Drupal server and various add-ons.

You can't hug every cat and it's hard to test apps on every phone, too. "One of the major challenges for [mobile] platform vendors, carriers, and handset manufacturers is how to make sure the best apps are available on their products," writes mobile developer Jason Grigsby, co-founder of a new nonprofit organization called Mobile Portland.

"One of the biggest challenges for mobile developers and businesses is getting access to devices for testing. Not even the largest of companies can afford to purchase all of the possible devices on which their software or services may run on." Mobile Portland hopes to find a solution in the place where those two challenges come together and is building what it believes will be the first community mobile device testing lab in the United States. It's a very ambitious project.

Cloud9 today announced a cloud-based commercial Integrated Development Environment that enables web and mobile developers to work together in remote teams anywhere.

Today Zoho announced Zoho Creator for Google Apps, bringing it total number Google Apps Marketplace offerings to 11 and making it the largest vendor in the marketplace. But more importantly, it is bringing Google Apps users an easy way to build simple applications on top of both the Zoho and Google platforms. There are limitations:

"Currently, there is no option to directly publish Zoho Creator apps within a Google Apps domain," says Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna. "Google said they will look into this idea." However, Google Apps admins will be able to share apps with users within the domain.

Angry Birds has been ported from mobile phones to netbooks. The game is now available from all versions of Intel AppUp center, including those distributed by Best Buy, Best Buy Canada, Future Shop, Dixons, Walmart, Asus, Croma, HSN, New Egg and TigerDirect.

Angry Birds makes an interesting case study for developers porting applications from one interface to another. Previously, we covered Conceptualizing Your Ported Application on the Netbook Platform.

VMware announced its acquisition of WaveMaker, a company that makes a graphical programming tool for non-developers. WaveMaker enables developers to build Java applications based on the open source framework Spring without writing code. VMware acquired SpringSource, the sponsor company of Spring.

Fabric is a Python library and command line tool for automating deployment and system administration tasks. "Fabric is an awesome tool," writes the London-based developer known as Tav. "Like Capistrano and Vlad, it makes deployments a lot simpler than with shell scripts on their own."

However, Tav discovered that as deployments got more complex, he started wishing for "cleaner and more powerful API." That's why he decided to add some new features to the Fabric source code and create his own project. It can be found here. Tav's changes aren't part of a proper fork, but that's something that's being discussed.

RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady challenges the conventional wisdom that Java is dying - a position typified by recent comments from Forrester analysts. O'Grady acknowledges that although Java has peaked in terms of popularity, it is hardly the dead end that Forrester claims it is.

O'Grady bases his claims on various data collected by RedMonk. RedMonk's research is focused on developers, instead of enterprise "decision makers." "We advantage this audience simply because we believe that bottom up adoption is more predictive of technology direction than top down procurement, but reasonable minds may obviously disagree," O'Grady writes.