It is day 3 of OSCON data & java, and the kick off to the main keynotes and core conference. There are a repeating topics throughout the conference:
The Web, It’s Still HUGE! Imagine that!
HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery/Node.js – This is starting to look like it will be the development stack of the web. If you use ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Java, or some other web stack these core technologies are here to augment or even in some cases completely replace traditional web stacks.
Node.js can replace web servers in some situations when core APIs or other fundamental simple services are needed. In addition to that the Node server will eventually, I have no doubt, be able to completely replace traditional web servers like Apache, Tomcat, or IIS for almost any web site. In addition to web sites though, Node provides a very valuable engine to develop and test hard core JavaScript, building reusable libraries, and other server oriented needs. The other huge boost for Node.js is the ability for a dev shop to be able to centralize development around a single language. Something that Java and .NET have tried in the past, yet failed to ever achieve. The big irony is JavaScript never started out with this intent, but here it is!
In addition to Node.js making inroads to the server environments worldwide, JavaScript in general is starting to be used for all sorts of tools, stacks, and frameworks outside of just the browser. It can be used to submit a request against Hadoop, it can create a way to access and manipulate CouchDb, MongoDb, and other databases. Javascript is becoming the one language to rule them all (please excuse my Tolkenism 😉 )
Cloud Computing or More Realistically, “Distributed, Geographically Dispersed, Highly Available, Highly Available, Resilient, Compute and Storage Segmented Functionality, and not to forget, Business Agility Oriented Utility Computing“.
Long enough title? There are numerous open source cloud platforms and infrastructure offerings available. At OSCON there was discussion and multiple session about OpenStack, the Open Cloud Initiative, Stratos, and other open software solutions for cloud computing. This is great news for developer working with cloud computing technologies, especially for ongoing efforts and pushes to gain adoption of cloud computing within Enterprise.
Companies will continue to push their own proprietary capabilities and features, but it would behoove the industry to standardize on an open platform such as OpenStack. Currently most major cloud/utility computing providers such as Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure lock a company into their specific APIs, SDKs, and custom way of doing things. A development team that is savvy can prevent that, but if the core feature sets around comput, storage, and otherwise were standardized this lock in issue could be resolved.
Half Way Mark, Check
So far the conference has provided lots of insight into the open source community. Announcements have been made that keep the open source community moving forward into the future. With that, some of the things to look forward to:
- I’ll have some in depth coverage of products, product releases, and services for some of the top open source companies.
- I will hopefully win a Github T-shirt, to go along with my score of t-shirts for Heroku and others that I’ve received!
- I’ll dig into some of the bleeding edge technologies around cloud computing including the likes of DotCloud!
I love the idea of Node.js but since it’s owned by Joyent I wonder if it will ever make it onto the big PAAS or IAAS platforms, like Google’s App Engine. I’d also love to see my hosting provider offer Node.js (as a basic option) but again I’m not holding my breath – perl and php are too entrenched (which I think is great for perl, but I’m not too crazy about php), so is apache – almost every Linux distro installs them by default. It’s going to take a lot of work for Joyent to make Node.js as ubiquitous as some of the older technologies. And Node.js is javascript’s best chance at become more than a browser language.
Yeah, I have similar concerns around Node.js, but with the growing support it’ll knock its way into more and more environments. 🙂
Either way, it is a positive move forward, especially considering some of the bloated messes that web servers have become.