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A BZ Media Publication
DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE NO. 308 $9.95 www.sdtimes.com
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A BZ Media Publication
DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE NO. 308 $9.95 www.sdtimes.com
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Contents
ISSUE 308 DECEMBER 2014
FROM THE EDITORS

9
SD Times on the Web
11
Microsoft gets enterprises, not consumers
11
Bringing unique talents into the workplace
NEWS
13
Microsoft offers major tool upgrade for

mobile-first, cloud-first world
14
Reaction to open-source .NET is swift, positive
17
Welcome to CodeFightClub
18
EFF: APIs cant be copyrighted
18
AtScript: Googles new superset JavaScript runtime
22
jQuery 3.0 and the future of Web development
24
A push for Web-based Java IDE
26
Developers losing interest in Google Glass
26
QSM adds agile to its Software Almanac
28
Syncfusion supports predictive models in

Essential Studio
31
Delivery speed hinges on testing
FEATURES
Finding a fit
for autism in
testing
page 34
Scaling enterprise agile
page 40
Navigating a shifting
PDF component landscape
COLUMNS
58
CODE WATCH by Larry OBrien

Can we code conscious programs?
60
GUEST VIEW by Ben Uretsky

The ideal IaaS gets out of the way
61
ANALYST VIEW by Rob Enderle

Smartphones are on the way out
62
page 47
INDUSTRY WATCH by David Rubinstein

Four areas for Big Data innovation
page 54
Software Development Times (ISSN 1528-1965) is published 12 times per year by BZ Media LLC, 225 Broadhollow Road, Suite 211, Melville, NY 11747. Periodicals postage paid at Huntington Station, NY, and
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www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
Meteor 1.0 crash lands

An open-source platform for building Web and mobile apps in JavaScript
hit version 1.0 recently, and its considered a new way for writing
softwareat least to its creators. [Meteor] should make everyday
things easy, even when those everyday things involve hundreds of
servers, millions of users, and integration with dozens of other systems,
according to the company. If youre curious, you can read more about it
at tinyurl.com/l26qcf8.
Its official: HTML5 is a standard

Good news for those who like standards: The W3C has
elevated HTML5 from a specification to a recommendation,
the groups highest endorsement. What does this mean,
though? With the Web popping up in places like TVs and
refrigerators, standardization helps developers make useful
programs for them, according to W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe.
You can read more about it in David Rubinsteins story at
tinyurl.com/kwlgdvl.
Steve Ballmer is finally becoming a man!

The former Microsoft CEO has always been involved in supporting
his Jewish roots, but hes never had a Bar Mitzvah. Until, well, soon.
At the WSJD Live conference, he revealed that he is studying for it.
Editor Rob Marvin had some suggestions for the soon-to-be mensch: Dont skimp on the smorgasboard at the cocktail hour. Pull out
all the stops... Park yourself at the bottom of the Grey Goose vodka
flume and let it flow. You can read more suggestions at
tinyurl.com/qjjzuoz, and maybe toss in some of your own!
Microsoft is the new

Sun Microsystems
Alex Handy isnt pulling his punches regarding Microsofts embrace of open source.
It reminds him of Suns futile attempts to
stay afloat once it lost its lead in the server
market. And while he isnt predicting
Microsofts doom, he says, Microsoft is
pushing back on the same thinking Sun had:
Open source commoditizes software, and
that means lower margins for companies
like Microsoft. It's now turning to open
source as a way to stem the tide of customers running away from it. Lots of readers had comments on this, and you can read
them at tinyurl.com/q6ywa78.
The Top 5 GitHub

projects from November
The worlds largest open-source repository of software
projects gives you a glimpse of its most popular projects.
Here are the hottest projects from November:
1) Material Design Icons

2) CoreFX
3) dotnet
4) Material UI
5) Awesome WPO
SD Times wants
to hear from you.
Join us on LinkedIn
and Facebook.
Octocat, 2013-2014
GitHub, Inc.
www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
11
FROM THE EDITORS
Microsoft gets enterprises, not consumers

W
ith the move to open-source
.NET and C#, Microsoft is making a clear statement that it feels its
future is in its software, not its Windows operating system. While largely
applauded in the technology industry
for moving toward openness and compatibility, the company is taking a major
risk. But its a risk that must be taken in
a world the company itself describes at
mobile-first, cloud-first.
In Microsofts 2010 fiscal year, the
Windows Division, which included the
operating system, accounted for
US$18.49 billion in revenue. Microsofts
Business Division, under which fell
Office, SharePoint and Dynamics,
reaped $18.62 billion. In the fourth
quarter of fiscal 2013, with the Surface
tablets now included, the Windows
Division took in $19.23 million, while
the Business Division, with the addition
of Office 365, grew to $24.72 billion. At
the end of its 2014 fiscal year, Microsoft
reported a $136 million decline in OEM
revenue for Windows due to softness in
the consumer PC market.
Moving into uncharted (for Microsoft) cross-platform waters runs counter to everything Microsoft has traditionally been. In fact, Microsoft is likely
the absolute last company most developers would think of when they think of
cross-platform compatibility.
But looking at how the industry has
matured and changed over the past
two decades, its becoming clear that
Microsofts old way of doing things
wasnt working anymore. With its
recent enterprise software announcements, Microsoft has shown it gets the
new cloud and mobile economies, and
its putting its productivity software
out onto every platform. That will likely fuel continued growth in the Business Division, even as Windows
growth will slow or even decline. It
makes sense that Microsoft would
make decisions that batten down the
enterprise hatches.
Its on the consumer side where
Microsoft cant seem to make major
gains. Windows Phone continues to
founder, as new hardware and a
revamped operating system to try find

their footing in a market long dominated by Apple and Google. The Surface
Pro and RT are also making negligible
inroads into the tablet market, and Windows 8 can be called an abject failure.
Its almost as if every consumer
product Microsoft makes is cursed! Ask
your mother what she thinks of Windows, see what she thinks. Wed bet the
answer is in the range of scared, confused, maybe even hate it.
Microsoft needs to rethink how it
plays in the consumer markets. If the
results of that thinking produce a new
version of Windows at a quarter of the
price and with 10x the stability, maybe
Microsoft will have more luck with consumers in the future. But considering
how much its now betting on its development tools and productivity suites
being cross-platform, were fairly certain
it will be some time before it commits
the necessary resources to the consumer
side required to break the stranglehold
its competitors have in the smartphone,
tablet and wearables markets. z
Bringing unique talents into the workplace

F
ar too many people on the autism
spectrum are unable to find
meaningful jobs. About 85% of people
with this poorly understood disorder
in the United States are either unemployed or underemployed, according
to the advocacy organization Autism
Speaks.
One of the many reasons that people
on the spectrum are unable to land a
job is because all too often people with
it are looked at as lacking social, communication or creative skills. While that
may be true for some, the important
thing to remember is it is a spectrum
meaning there is no definitive answer
as to what an autistic person should
embody. What employers seem to for-
get is that people on the spectrum can

excel in areas of visual skills, music,
math and art.
As reported in this issue, many people on the autism spectrum have
heightened attention to detail, excellent organizational skills and great
memory. But they are overshadowed by
the word autism. In schools, it is easier for an autistic person to thrive
because these places have made
accommodations to make the autistic
feel comfortable. The same thing needs
to happen in the workplace.
According to the Organization for
Autism Research, the five keys to successfully employing and supporting a
person with autism includes:
1. Getting to know your employee

2. Orienting him or her with specific job duties
3. Fostering a welcoming and
supportive workplace
4. Maximizing your companys
existing support systems
5. Providing clear directions and
performance feedback.
Stephen Shore, author of Beyond
the Wall: Personal Experiences with
Autism and Asperger Syndrome, once
said, If youve met one person with
autism, youve met one person with
autism. Organizations should remember that a person on the spectrum is
complex and unique, and everyone
deserves a chance. z
SDT308 page 13,14.qxd_Layout 1 11/18/14 2:58 PM Page 13
www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
Microsoft offers major tool upgrade

for mobile-first, cloud-first world
.NET to go open source; Visual Studio, Azure updated
BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN
Updates to Visual Studio, Visual Studio

Online, Azure and the .NET Framework were announced at a New York
City event in November.
Public previews of Visual Studio 2015
and .NET 2015 have been made availablealong with new cross-platform
tools in Visual Studio 2015while .NET
is going open source and cross-platform.
The company also announced a free
Community edition of Visual Studio.
Soma Somasegar, corporate vice
president of the developer division at
Microsoft, said in an interview with SD
Times that developers are center stage
in a cloud-first, mobile-first world. The
reason I say that is because its the developers who are going to be building the
applications and experiences and services that you and I and anybody else are
going to be experiencing through the
variety of devices that we have access to
with a set of services that are running in
the cloud that offer these experiences.
In Visual Studio Community 2013,
Somasegar said developers can build
Windows desktop or Windows universal
applications that target the entire
ecosystem of Microsoft devices, or build
a cross-platform mobile device application targeting mobile devices, using C#,
HTML, JavaScript or .NET. It was
designed, he said, for individual developers and startups; enterprise users will
still require licenses.
Visual Studio 2015 extends crossplatform development capabilities with
Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova
and Visual C++ tools for cross-platform
library development.
The Cordova toolset allows Windows developers to use HTML5 and
JavaScript right in Microsofts development environment. Further, Somasegar
said, a deeper integration with Xamarin
brings the ability to use C++, C# and

.NET to build apps for Android, iOS
and Windows mobile devices.
The updated IDE will also include a
Connected Services Manager, which is a
kind of app store for APIs in Visual Stu-
Microsofts Somasegar says developers are

still the main focus of the companys efforts.
dio 2015. APIs are becoming the new

digital currency, Somasegar said, and
this feature will enable services such as
Office 365, Salesforce and Azure Platform Services to be built in to the apps.
Other additions in Visual Studio
2015 include:
An Android emulator, so developers
can see how the UI and navigation of
their apps will work on Android
devices;
ASP.NET vNext, which Somasegar
called a ground-up redesign for the
cloudboth public cloud on Azure or
private cloud on Windows servers;
Smart Unit Testing, brought in from
Microsoft Research, where it was
known as Pex;
And the Unity game engine, which

Microsoft obtained in its acquisition
of SyntaxTree in July.
.NET opened up
Next for .NET is delivering it as open
source, a process that began with the
April announcement that the Roslyn
compiler stack would be open source.
Weve been open-sourcing parts of the
.NET Framework over the last 12-18
months or so, said Somasegar. Were
going to take the next big step forward
and say that the server-side .NET stack
is going to be open-sourced fully, starting with ASP.NET at the top going all
the way down to base class libraries and
the Common Language Runtime.
Microsoft is setting up a GitHub
repository to get the Mono community
and others to work with the company as
it open-sources .NET, Somasegar
added. The goal, he said, is to have one
open-source stack instead of multiple
stacks, and he said Microsoft hopes to
leverage the expertise of the engineers
working on Mono to accomplish that.
The Mono base, the early reaction
has been positive. Its something theyve
been asking of us for a while, he said.
Somasegar also noted that Microsoft
plans to take the .NET core server runtime and framework cross-platform to
Linux and Mac OS platforms. When
asked what porting Microsofts essential
tools to other platforms might mean for
Windows, he said, We want to continue making sure that .NET is a fantastic
programming environment and a runtime platform on Windows. At the same
time, we also want to make sure that
developers have a broader choice.
As to the experience on Linux,
Somasegar added, We own .NET; we
dont necessarily own Linux. We have
continued on page 14 >
13
SDT308 page 13,14.qxd_Layout 1 11/18/14 2:58 PM Page 14
14
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
Reaction to open-source Microsoft tools

.NET is swift, positive
< continued from page 13
that developers are masters of the

Reaction to Microsofts announce- universe (at least in the software
ment that it was giving up its .NET world), and added, Open source has
Core to open source has been swift, fundamentally altered the software
and largely positive.
industry and that puts
Almost as telling as
developers...in charge.
the reaction to the techniZemlin estimated that
cal portions of the an80% of a stack is made up
nouncement was the reacof open-source software,
tion to Microsofts decision
and 20% is custom, proto open-source the .NET
prietary software. As a
stack and enable it to run
result, companies and
on Linux or Mac OS platindividuals are hustling to
forms.
understand how to harness
Al Hilwa, program dicollaborative development
rector of software develop- Even Linuxs Jim Zemlin to advance new technoloment research at industry was optimistic about
gies and transform maranalysis firm IDC, tweet- Microsofts new stance. kets, he said.
ed: #spacecraft lands on
IDCs Hilwa called
#comet, #Microsoft open-sources Microsofts announcements huge
#dotnet, #VisualStudio to support and a real win and a shot in the arm
#Linux & #iOS Pigs to fly!
for the Microsoft developer ecosysForrester Research analyst Jeffrey tem. There has been a lot of demand
Hammond wrote in a note to his for Visual Studio to support other
clients: Weve now come 180 degrees platforms and other development
from Microsoft execs attacking Linux ecosystems, especially running on the
(and open source) as a cancer. And it Mac and supporting iOS developwasnt that long ago that pitched bat- ment. That so much of the developer
tles were fought inside the halls of and middleware stack is going open
Redmond over cross-platform (i.e., source is certainly a sign of a fastanything but Windows) support.
transforming Microsoft.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of
In his note, Forresters Hammond
the Linux Foundation, lauded the pointed out that todays Microsoft is
announcement, but noted begrudging- less about Windows, as the company
ly, We do not agree with everything can no longer afford to ignore conMicrosoft does, and certainly many sumers that dont use Windows, or
open-source projects compete directly developers that dont deploy on it. He
with Microsoft products. However, the also pointed out that open-sourcing
new Microsoft we are seeing today is .NET and embracing Linux puts the
certainly a different organization when Azure team on an equal footing with
it comes to open source.
key competitors like Amazon, Google
Microsoft corporate vice president and IBM.
of the developer division Soma
Hammond added, The changes
Somasegar said in an interview with shatter .NETs status quo as a WinSD Times that in a mobile-first, dows-only developer framework, so
cloud-first world, developers are Microsoft can hold onto its .NET
center stage.
developers deploying to other platIn his blog, Zemlin pointed out forms and attract new developers as
that Microsoft has always understood well. z
BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN
to figure out how to work with the Linux community to make it great. Our
goal is to make sure .NET is fantastic
on every platform we support, but that
platform also has to work with us.
A DevOps focus for Visual Studio Online

Release-Management-as-a-Service tops
the new capabilities announced for Visual Studio Online, as Microsoft looks to
round out the ALM suite with DevOps
services. The Release Management feature was only available to those using the
on-premises Team Foundation Server.
This feature enables organizations to
orchestrate code deployment and configuration artifacts throughout the development life cycle.
Meanwhile, Cloud Deployment Projectsblueprints for configurationlet
you describe your configuration as code,
Somasegar said. Currently, Web workloads and SQL workloads are supported.
Cloud Deployment Projects ship with
the Azure 2.5 SDK, which now has new
capabilities for cloud diagnostics.
Also in the next Visual Studio Online
release, Build vNext brings in what
Microsoft is calling the next-generation
build system that introduces reusable
tasks that enable the creation of custom build workflows.
Armed with this complete set of
tools, the opportunity for a developer
has never been this high, Somasegar
said. On the one hand you have literally a couple billion devices that are your
target as a developer... On other hand,
the cloud, because of its inherent
nature of scale and elasticity and economics and other kinds of benefits,
takes care of any and all infrastructure
needs that you have. So the barrier to
entry for you as a developer is very low.
You dont need to worry about
hardware, you dont need to worry
about capital expenses, you just need to
build an app, get an account, and then
you pay as you go, and you are
boomup and running, and youve got
access to a worldwide customer base
instantaneously. z
www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
Welcome to CodeFightClub
U.K. software engineer kicks off online programming arena
BY ROB MARVIN
The first rule of CodeFightClub is...its

okay to talk about CodeFightClub.
So says Andrew Hathaway, the 18year-old software engineer from
Leeds, U.K., who started the head-tohead online programming arena
known as CodeFightClub. Since its
lanuch in early November, CodeFightClub has signed up more
than 100 users via Twitter logins,
and theyve started seven
fights thus far.
The project, which draws
not-to-subtle
inspiration
from a certain cult film and
Chuck Palahniuk novel, was
sparked by a fleeting idea to
give young coders a fun, competitive atmosphere in which to hone
their skills.
CodeFightClub was one of those
ideas that comes to you whilst youre
trying to get to sleep at night. I had to
grab my phone quickly before I fell
asleep and forgot it, said Hathaway.
Quite recently a lot of my friends
have either been getting into development, or trying to become the best
developers they can. One of the most
common questions between developers is Can I write this any better? or
Is this fast and efficient? and to help
developers learn what they can do to
write better code, I created CodeFightClub.
The concept is pretty simple. Users
can start a fight in 84 programming
languages and templating syntaxes, and
the two fighters trade blows in the
form of writing code blocks back and
forth. Rather than one fighter knocking
the other to the floor of some dingy
basement, crowd votes and comments
decide the fights victor.
The current process starts with a
user posting two blocks of code in the
same language, a title and a description, Hathaway explained. After this,
its up to the community to vote which

contender they most prefer and comment with their reasons why.
The comments are the key part to
learning on CodeFightClub. When a
user explains why they prefer a certain
contender and what they could do to
make it even better, [this will] help fellow developers to think differently in
the future and therefore become
well-versed.
So far, he has tallied 73 votes and 18

comments across the seven fights,
which range from JavaScript, PHP and
Scala to C# and CSS.
Building the CodeFightClub

Hathaway built the simple coding arena with the Express.js Web application framework for Node.js. He also
chose a PostgreSQL database because
its a very mature database with none
of MySQLs weird idiosyncrasies. For
the real-time views showing code
fighters duking it out, he employed
React.js.
The current version of the site is
basic, Hathaway said, but he plans to
implement a backlog of features and
changes in the near future. He also
works full-time as a software engineer
at digital search and SEO company
Branded3, and has his hands full with
several other open-source and freelance projects.

Hathaway has been coding since age
12, when he started building Windows
utilities in Visual Basic 6, and has since
worked in C#, CSS, HTML and .NET.
He has also passed Britains GCSE secondary school examinations, and he
hopes to launch a startup of his own
down the road.
As for CodeFightClub, the creator
has Tyler Durden-like hopes of the
community taking on a life of its
own... without the descent into
Project Mayhem.
The community is definitely something Im hoping to grow with CodeFightClub, Hathaway said. The idea
that someone could post two ideas and
get a good discussion going and a fair
winner at the end pretty quickly. My
main goal is to build a community
where people are helpful toward each
other, share their knowledge and look
forward to helping out their fellow
developers.
Hathaway has been floored by the
immediate response to what began as a
passion project. CodeFightClub isnt
about winning or losing, but even
Hathaway is somewhat taken aback at
the voracity with which programmers
have jumped at the chance to
metaphorically pummel the daylights
out of each other.
If Im honest, I never really thought
the CodeFightClub would even go this
far, but its had some great reviews and
responses from the development community, he said. I have no idea where
it will go; I guess its up to the community to help me grow the club and keep
up the momentum weve managed to
kick off with.
As for seeing myself like the Narrator, Tyler Durden, or any of the other
characters, Id have to say no. I hope
not anywayIm not one to pick a
fight! z
17
18
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
EFF: APIs cant be copyrighted

Advocacy group weighs in on Oracle v. Google copyright battle
BY ROB MARVIN
The Electronic Frontier Foundation

has legally weighed in on the ongoing
software copyright dispute between
Google and Oracle, and its message is
clear: APIs cannot be copyrighted.
The nonprofit digital rights organization has filed a brief with the U.S.
Supreme Court, signed by 77 computer
scientists and legal experts, arguing that
the latest appellate court decision recognizing a copyrightable nature of APIs
puts the computer software industry in
jeopardy by upending decades of established non-copyrightable API practice.
This precedent, the brief argued, has
allowed for the creation of interoperable computer technology.
For decades, computer scientists
have relied on the open nature of APIs

to enable rapid innovation in computer
technology, the brief stated. Today,
open, uncopyrightable APIs continue to
spur the creation and adoption of new
technologies. When programmers can
freely reimplement or reverse-engineer
an API without obtaining a costly license
or risking a lawsuit, they can create compatible software that the interfaces original creator might never have envisioned
or had the resources to develop.
The Oracle v. Google copyright battle over Androids Java APIs has been
raging for years. The latest salvo was
Mays landmark appellate court decision in favor of Oracle. In October,
Google requested that the Supreme
Court review the decision.
According to the EFF, the briefs

signatories include five Turing Award
winners, four National Medal of Technology winners, and notable computer
programmers like C++ creator Bjarne
Stroustrup, Python creator Guido van
Rossum, Hal Abelson, Brian Behlendorf, Ward Cunningham, Peter
Deutsch, David Dill, Dave Farber, Ed
Felten, Mitch Kapor, Alan Kay, Brian
Kernighan, Avi Rubin, Bruce Schneier
and others.
The EFF brief was far from the only
one filed on Googles behalf in this case.
Additional briefs to the Supreme Court
include one from the Computer and
Communications Industry Association,
and one from nonprofit intellectual property interest group Public Knowledge. z
AtScript: Googles new superset JavaScript runtime

BY ROB MARVIN
Googles continuing quest to improve

JavaScript took another step forward
with the unveiling of AtScript, a new
superset JavaScript runtime type system written into AngularJS 2.0.
AtScript is designed to run on top of
not only ECMAScript 5 and the
upcoming ECMAScript 6, but atop
Microsofts superset TypeScript language as well. The goal of AtScript is to
make type annotation data available at
runtime to enhance JavaScript.
According to Google, AtScript is a
purely optional extension of JavaScript
to annotations and typing in AngularJS
2.0. As with TypeScript, AtScript code
automatically compiles to JavaScript,
using nominal types to improve
JavaScript syntax while maintaining
semantic compatibility with ECMAScript 5 and 6.
According to Googles open-source
AtScript Primer, the superset runtime
was inspired by characteristics of both
TypeScript and Dart, but is designed to
improve upon TypeScripts lack of
dynamic analysis capabilities, metadata
annotations and runtime annotation

access, as well as Darts semantic differences to JavaScript.
AtScript is, in the eyes of Google and
the AngularJS team, another step in the
evolution of JavaScript. ECMAScript 6
adds classes and modules to JavaScript;
TypeScript sits on top of it with types;
and AtScript lays annotations and introspection on top of TypeScript.
In the primer, the AngularJS team
laid out the current status and future
plans for AtScript. The AtScript syntax
is serving as the foundation for AngularJS 2.0, which is being written on top of
it. AtScript uses the open-source
Traceur compiler to ingest the AtScript
syntax, generate ECMAScript code,
and transpile the code into Dart or
JavaScript.
Plans for AtScript include:
A standalone type system static analysis tool, similar to the Dart Analyzer
or TypeScript.
More support for generics in the runtime type system, beyond arrays and
maps.
ECMAScript 5+ClosureAnnotation
output to allow integration with existing Closure projects.

Source maps support for easier
debugging and translation of stack
trace line numbers.
AngularJS creator Miko Hevery
sees AtScript as ECMAScript 6 plus
annotations. He believed AtScript has
the potential to work in tandem with
ECMAScript 6 and TypeScript to
implement official types in JavaScript,
and he plans to ultimately push for an
AtScript standard in JavaScript.
Our plan is to use AtScript for
building Angular and optionally let
users of Angular leverage AtScript to
build their own applications, Hevery
wrote in the AtScript primer. AtScript
is independent of Angular, and as such
we think it would be useful for other
non-Angular projects.
What seems to be under contention
is: What do these types mean? AtScript
specifically defines syntax, but stays
clear of the semantic discussion; therefore we think it would be a good introductory step towards official types in
JavaScript. z
SDT308 page 20,21_Layout 1 11/18/14 3:00 PM Page 20
March 9-11, 2015

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Software App Developers
Special Events
Women in Wearables Luncheon
Exhibit Hall Reception Lightning Talks
Industry Keynotes
Hackathons
SDK Walkthroughs
22
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
jQuery 3.0 and the future

of Web development
Dave Methvin goes over the changes made to the
JavaScript library and what comes next
BY ROB MARVIN
with the evolving Web landscape?
In the eight years since its initial

release, jQuery has become the foundation of the modern Web. The popular
cross-platform library has become bundled and intertwined with countless
websites, developer tools and with
JavaScript itself.
The next step for the open-source
platform is jQuery 3.0. In a recent blog
post entitled jQuery 3.0: The Next Generations, jQuery development team
core lead and jQuery Foundation president Dave Methvin previewed what
developers can expect in jQuerys next
release. SD Times spoke with Methvin
about the rise of the JavaScript library
over the past decade, how jQuery has
changed and where the platform, and
ultimately Web development is headed.
I dont think well ever be done with

evangelizing important goals like accessibility, internationalization, and crossbrowser design. As far as code goes,
were in the process of merging the UI
and Mobile code. Theres not a bright
line between the two now that phones
are as powerful as desktops.
SD Times: On your blog, you talk about

how jQuery has changed along with the
Web over the past several years. As team
lead, can you describe how youve
observed and shaped those changes in the
development of the library?
Methvin: Developer practices have gotten much more disciplined over that
time, so for example things like browser
sniffing were very popular years ago, but
are considered a bad practice today. In
early 2013 we released version 1.9 that
removed jQuery APIs that encouraged
bad practices, but also provided a jQuery
Migrate plug-in to help developers identify and remediate their code.
During this time weve also made
jQuery modular so that developers
focused on the smallest possible file
size can exclude parts they dont need.
Previously, jQuery was knee-deep in
jQuery Mobile, challenging UI conventions
to bring more mobility to JavaScript.
Would you say that goal has been
achieved, and how has it changed along
requestAnimationFrame support into

jQuery 1.6.0 back in May 2011 but had
to remove it in 1.6.1 due to compatibility issues with browsers and several
popular jQuery plug-ins. We think we
have those issues worked out now.
What are some of the larger goals for
jQuery and the jQuery Foundation right
now, both in terms of the technology itself
Whats the thinking behind the decision to
and the ecosystem around it?
shift to semantic versioning, and what
This is another change driven by modern best practices. Semantic versions

usually indicate API compatibility, but
we were using them to indicate browser
compatibility. By separating jQuery into
two different packages with the same
version, were making it clear that the
two are API compatible.
We dont anticipate that jQuery 3.0
will break a lot of existing code, and we
plan to update the jQuery Migrate
plug-in to warn about most of the
things that are changing. Even so, when
you think about how widely jQuery is
used, just about any change we make
could be a breaking change.
Youre right on target when you mention

the ecosystem. Because of jQuerys role,
we end up needing to pass along a lot of
feedback to ensure that the Web platform really serves the needs of developers. Those go beyond writing code and
require us to coordinate efforts within
the community. The jQuery Foundation
is actively involved in standards organizations like the [World Wide Web Consortium] and the TC39 ECMAScript
committee. We keep communication
lines open with the major browser makers, especially for things like bug reports.
We have also joined collaborations with
other industry groups for JavaScript
library internationalization and CSS
standard frameworks.
What can Web developers and the open-
jQuery is much more than just a cross-
source community expect in terms of oth-
platform library at this point. Whats your
er new features and improvements in
vision for where jQueryand by exten-
does that signify for jQuery?
jQuery 3.0? What else does the dev team
sion, Web developmentgoes next?
have in the works?
The jQuery Foundation has first-hand

experience with the challenges developers face on todays Web platform.
Problems like package and dependency
management on the client-side are still
pretty hard to tackle, and new technologies like Web Components are going to
make those issues even more critical to
solve. Wed also like to play a part in
standardizing the other tooling that
everyone should use on a daily basis,
such as linters and style checkers. Web
developers deserve world-class tools. z
Lets be clear, this is not a major rework

of jQuerys API like Angular just
announced. jQuerys design doesnt
need a lot of change, and were quite
happy to just make drama-free tweaks to
improve it. Two changes that weve
already decided upon are Promise/A+
compatibility for our Deferred implementation and the return of requestAnimationFrame for animations in order to
improve performance and battery life.
We actually had incorporated
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24
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
A push for Web-based Java IDE

Eclipse, Codenvy seek contributions from outside companies
BY ALEX HANDY
The Eclipse Foundation envisions a

future where software is written within
a browser. While the Eclipse Orion
project has already produced a Webbased IDE for JavaScript, HTML and
CSS,
the
Eclipse
Foundation
announced the Eclipse Cloud Development project, an effort to bring even
more of the software development tool
chain into the browser.
The ECD project includes code
contributions from Codenvy, IBM, Pivotal and SAP. SAP is contributing Dirigible, a proposed project to build Rapid
Application Development tools based
in the cloud and browser. Codenvy, on
the other hand, has contributed Che,
an expansive Java IDE and server-side
provisioning system designed to push
Java development into the cloud. IBMs
work has been on the Orion side of the
spectrum, and Pivotal is working on
project Flux, an effort to bridge the gap
between desktop and cloud-based
development tools.
Tyler Jewell, CEO of Codenvy, said
that Che includes a large portion of his
companys core infrastructure, all now
open source.
Codenvy has many layers: the kernel
for running extensions, the extension
SDK, about 55 extensions we have built,
a cloud IDE, enterprise infrastructure to
run the system at scale, and the Puppet
infrastructure for installation and maintenance updates. We have donated
everything but the enterprise infrastruc-
Codenvy's Web-based Java IDE is now a part of the Eclipse Foundation as Project Che.
ture and the Puppet infrastructure to

Eclipse Che. It is our hope to also
donate the enterprise infrastructure
once the initial Che releases have been
properly vetted, said Jewell.
Codenvys work is currently available
under the EPL, said Jewell. It has
been converted to EPL and it is currently going through the Eclipse licensing process. While in incubation, its
available for developers to compile and
run [on GitHub]. It will be moved to
Eclipses systems soon.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said,
Theres a definite trend in pushing
developer tooling toward the cloud.
This has been something weve all been
observing for a couple of years, and
Proxygen: Facebooks C++ HTTP framework

BY ROB MARVIN
Facebook has open-sourced a collection of C++ HTTP libraries and an

HTTP server that it calls Proxygen.
According to Facebook software
engineers Alan Frindell and Daniel
Sommermann, Proxygen is not
designed to replace the C-based Apache
or Nginx HTTP servers, but rather to
build a high-performance C++ HTTP
framework with sensible defaults,

including both server and client code to
integrate into applications.
We initially planned for Proxygen
to be a software library for generating
proxies, hence the name. But Proxygen
has evolved considerably since the early
days of the project, Frindell and Sommermann wrote.
Facebook decided to build its own
there are, at the moment, a lot of different solutions in the cloud editing, cloud
IDE space. Those of us who are old
enough to remember there was once a
time when there were 40 desktop IDEs
out there, probably, like us, think the
industry is heading toward another similar and inevitable consolidation.
Milinkovich said this move to the
Web wont come at the cost of existing
desktop tools, however. Specifically,
Project Flux is designed to offer a way
for developers to connect such tools to
the cloud and the browser. There has
been 30 years of investment in our
desktop tools. Its important to have the
ability to integrate desktop tools with
Web-based tools so you an use the right
tool at the right time. z
HTTP stack to foster integration with its
infrastructure, according to the developers. Proxygen is also designed for scaling
and code reuse, with more than a dozen
internal Facebook systems built on it,
including the Haystack photo infrastructure and the Hip-Hop Virtual Machine.
Proxygen also supports the SPDY/3
and SPDY/3.1 open networking protocols, and the Facebook engineering team
is currently iterating and developing support for HTTP/2. z
26
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
Developers losing interest in Google Glass

Lack of a consumer market is biggest drawback, according to Reuters report
BY CHRISTINA MULLIGAN
When the Google Glass was first

released, the company promised to provide seamless, beautiful and empowering technology all through a consumers
eyes. But with the device in the hands
of developers for more than a year, a
new report finds that the Glass is more
than half empty, as developers are losing interest and the hype is beginning
to die down.
According to Reuters, nine out of 16
Google glass application developers contacted admitted they stopped working
on their Glass projects or abandoned
them altogether due to the devices limitations and lack of market. In addition,
another three told Reuters they deserted
their consumer projects and moved onto
developing for businesses.
If there were 200 million Google
Glasses sold, it would be a different

perspective. Theres no market at this
point, Tom Frencel, CEO of Little
Guy Games, told Reuters.
In addition, Reuters found that several Google Glass employees had fled
their positions, such as former director
of developer relations Ossama Alami,
former electrical engineering chief
Adrian Wong, and former lead developer Babak Parviz. Even Google
cofounder Sergey Brin was caught at a
red carpet event without his Glass,
which he normally wears.
But despite dwindling interest,
Google still has high hopes for the
Google Glass.
We are completely energized and
as energized as ever about the opportunity that wearables and Glass in particular represent, Chris ONeill, head of
business operations for the Google
Glass, told Reuters. We are committed
as ever to a consumer launch. That is
going to take time and we are not going
to launch this product until its
absolutely ready.
Google Glass release, which was
expected this year, is now anticipated
for 2015. z
QSM adds agile to its Software Almanac

It has been eight years since Quantitative Software Management (QSM)

released its Software Almanac, and now
the company is putting out an updated
version that includes a new section on
agile development.
The Software Almanac is a compilation of QSMs years of research and historical data about software projects
designed to provide customers with an
understanding of what is going on in
the IT industry, how they can adopt
tools, and what concepts are working or
not working, according to Doug Putnam, co-CEO of QSM.
The almanac provides some quantitative data and some observation
from that data that people are always
sort of clamoring for, he said. In
general, it is a lot of really good industry information that most people
arent going to have available to them
anywhere else.
One of the newest sections in the
2014 version of the Software Almanac is

a section on agile.
In 2006, we were just starting to
hear about agile, but we didnt have
any completed projects or enough history that we could talk authoritatively
about what we were seeing, Putnam
said. Now we are at the position
where we do have enough of that history and we can talk, at least with a
reasonably decent sample of projects,
about what we are seeing in the agile
world.
The almanac provides users with an
understanding of how to scale small
projects to large enterprises, some difficulties organizations have faced with
agile, and what the typical agile project
looks like. There also are demographics
on small, medium and large projects in
order to give users a sense of how long
a project takes and how much effort is
needed for a certain team size.
Anyone that is sort of moving to
agile as a new endeavor can get a sense
for what the learning curve is that they

are up against, Putnam said.
In addition, the almanac covers core
metrics such as time to market, product
quality, functionality, staffing and costrelated items, and planning. The guidance includes a long-term section that
looks at how things have changed from
a time-to-market standpoint and from a
cost-reduction standpoint; how languages have changed in terms of primary languages used for development;
how much software is actually being
reused versus newly developed software; and how that mix and composition has changed over time, according
to Putnam.
The new 2014 version provides a
great resource for project managers,
decision makers and executive management who can connect our data and
research to trend information to see
whats actually happening with IT software projects across several industries,
he said. z
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28
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
COMPONENT WATCH
Syncfusion supports predictive

models in Essential Studio
New controls, report viewer also added
and they can model using the environSyncfusion wants to make predictive ment of their choice, Jebaraj said.
analytics easier for developers with the
The JavaScript suite has been updatlatest release of Essential Studio 2014.
ed for displaying and editing data,
This volume is our biggest,
including Chart, Grid and
boldest release ever, said
Schedule controls. DevelopDaniel Jebaraj, vice president
ers can now edit diagram conof Syncfusion. Syncfusion is
trol connectors, localize diaforging ahead with enterprise
grams for any region, and
offerings that are unprecedentexport them as an image.
ed in both function and scale,
Gantt control has been updatwith our deployment solution
ed to include schedule modes,
for predictive analytics being a
segment spacing and dragprime example.
Syncfusions Jebaraj and-drop connector line ediEssential Studio 2014 Vol- highlighted feeless tion.
ume 3 comes with a new prod- predictive models.
The LightSwitch HTML
uct for deploying predictive
client has been improved with
models. The Essential Predictive Ana- 15 new control extensions for creating
lytics is a .NET execution engine that data-driven line-of-business applicauses the industry-standard Predictive tions. The extensions include a charting
Model Markup Language and provides component, a report viewer, and a data
developers with real-time insight into grid control.
their .NET applications without requirIn addition, Volume 3 also enhances
ing any third-party dependencies, Essential Studio for Xamarin with a
according to the company. Models can new suite of controls for developing
be performed using environments such cross-platform mobile projects build
as R, SAS and SPSS with .NET applica- with Xamarin.Forms. Controls include
tions.
a chart with support for 14 different
Our customers can now easily chart types, a gauge with extensive cusdeploy predictive models without pay- tomization options, and file-format
ing any deployment fees or royalties, libraries for working with Excel, Word
and PDF files.
Other Essential Studio 2014 Volume 3 features include report viewer
controls for JavaScript, ASP.NET and
ASP.NET MVC; five new
Windows Form controls; and
radial menu, ribbon, tile, and
color picker controls for
JavaScript. z
New Xamarin controls address cross-platform development.
In other component news

Accusoft has added performance
enhancements to its HTML 5 document
viewer. The document, content and imaging solution provider recently announced
Prizm Content Connect version 9.1. The
latest release provides accelerates rendering speed to streamline user experience and reduce network traffic, according to the company.
Microsoft component solution provider
ComponentOne (a division of GrapeCity)
has released ActiveReports 9, a .NET
reporting solution that integrates with
Microsoft Visual Studio. ActiveReport 9
comes with a new feature, Layers, that
allows developers to export or print
different groups of controls. ComponentOne also released Studio Enterprise
2014 v3, a suite of data and UI controls
for Microsoft Visual Studio. The v3
release features a new template that is
pre-populated with JavaScript controls
found in Wijmo 5, GrapeCitys line of
HTML5 and JavaScript products for
enterprise app development.
Java-based PDF tool provider Qoppa
Software has added a new library to optimize PDF documents and reduce file
sizes. The jPDFOptimizer removes unnecessary objects in PDF documents, detects
and merges duplicate images and fonts,
and modifies image resolution, compression and color spaces to reduce size. The
library doesnt require any third-party
software or drivers, and runs on any
operating system with a standard Java
implementation.
Telerik has updated its HTML5 and
JavaScript framework to help developers
solve complex data manipulation scenarios. The updated version of Kendo UI features new data-management widgets and
updates to its DataViz widgets, Grid components, Scheduler, Diagram and Gantt.
ComponentOne has released Spread
Studio 8, its spreadsheet solution. Spread
Studio 8 now includes a Table feature,
new skins for WinForm and ASP.NET controls, and the ability to import Excel files
asynchronously. z
Announcing a BZ Media Event
For the builders, buyers and flyers of commercial drones.

Registration Opens January 1, 2015!
October 13-15, 2015

Rio, Las Vegas
www.InterDrone.com
www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
DEVOPS AND TEST
Delivery speed hinges on testing

BY LISA MORGAN
oftware teams are expected to

deliver high-quality software in
ever-shorter timeframes, but in practice
release speed or quality usually suffers.
When release speed is the primary driver, testing may be compromised or a subset of planned features may be released.
When quality is the main goal, the
release schedule may slip. In todays
increasingly mobile world where application alternatives are just a mouse click or
a tap away, businesses must find ways to
deliver high-quality products at speed.
of themdevelopment, testing and

operationsto talk to each other and
consume each others work. Otherwise,
you cant accelerate software delivery.
Why testing remains a bottleneck

There is no shortage of tools for addressing specific testing requirements; however, tool fragmentation often works
against software development organizations as a whole. Understandably, differ-
and consume each others work.

Even within the testing function,
siloed practices can negatively impact
product quality and team productivity.
There are manual testing and automated testing silos in organizations when
really they need to work together for the
benefit of the QA manager, said Kaul.
A lot of organizations have traceability
across automated tests, which is very
important. But they forget about the
Testing isnt a second-class citizen

Product features have always been sexier than testing even though the reputation of products and the companies
who produced them depends on quality. Developers enjoy the lions share of
tool investment, while testing is often
treated as a cost center with dubious
business value, at least until customers
complain or abandon the product, or a
high-profile failure occurs.
Similarly, more time is allocated to
coding than testing. As organizations
become more agile, testing teams, like
everyone else involved in the SDLC,
have to work even faster. To keep pace,
more tests need to be automated.
The DevOps movement also demonstrates that testing doesnt get the attention it deserves. Although more development and operations teams are
working closer together, the DevOps
term (and sometimes even the practice)
overlooks testing.
If Im rapidly developing software,
following TDD or BDD, testing is the
only way I can ensure my ops guy is
going to be happy, said Nikhil Kaul, a
product marketing manager at software
testing solution provider SmartBear.
You need a mechanism that allows all
SmartBears QAComplete is designed to eliminate redundancy in testing.
ent roles and different teams use different tools, but the siloed nature of the
tools often results in inefficiencies such
as duplicate efforts and incomplete test
coverage. Software teams can avoid such
inefficiencies when the efforts of manual
and automated testing teams working
across desktop, mobile, and Web are
universally orchestrated and monitored.
Tools are generally designed for a
specific audience, so they dont pay
attention to the overhead that is created
as a result of having so many disjointed
tools, said Kaul. When you have a lot
of people using a lot of different tools,
the amount of effort that is necessary to
work across teams is huge, especially if
you want them to collaborate or reuse
manual side of things. You need visibility

across both because there are things you
wont catch with automated testing.
A healthcare company once used
spreadsheets to trace both manual and
automated tests back to requirements.
After it implemented SmartBear testing solutions to create, run and report
on tests, the testing team discovered it
had been missing coverage for some
requirements entirely. In retrospect, it
became clear that the automated and
manual testing teams wrongly assumed
that the other team was creating and
running tests when in fact no such tests
had been created or executed.
Despite the many challenges that
This article is sponsored by SmartBear Software, a leader in DevOps and software testing with expertise across code review,
automated testing and test management, functional and load testing, application quality and performance, and API testing.
31
32
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
DEVOPS AND TEST
Test smarter with SmartBear

Testing more doesnt always improve
product quality, but testing smarter does.
Using SmartBear TestComplete and
QAComplete, software teams can avoid
unnecessary test duplication, improve
overall testing efficiency, and ensure full
traceability from requirements to testing
to defect resolution. More than 2 million
users in 90 countries rely on SmartBears easy-to-use test and performancemanagement solutions to ensure the
quality of their desktop, mobile, Web and
cloud applications as well as to keep pace
with accelerating release cycles.
Automate tests effectively

TestComplete is an open test platform
for creating, maintaining, and executing
automated tests across desktop, Web,
mobile and client-server applications. Its
easy-to-use interface allows novice
testers, business analysts, and expert
test engineers to quickly build and reuse
script-free tests. TestComplete is also
customizable so it can accommodate
existing processes and adapt to personal
preferences.
Users can generate scripts by simply
recording and replaying any kind of test
for a mobile, Web or desktop application, said Nikhil Kaul, a product marketing manager at SmartBear. The tests
are really robust because TestComplete
works at the object level rather than at
the image level. When the applications
interface changes or when controls are
moved, added or resized, existing regression tests dont fail.
Financial service and solution provider
Fidelity National Information Services
used TestComplete to automate lengthy
manual tests, identify problematic application areas, and expand the types of
tests it automates. Now, test runs can be
executed in 15 minutes rather than two
hours.
Developers building smartphone and
tablet apps use the TestComplete Mobile
module to test iOS 8 applications as well
SmartBears Kaul says that his companys

products help novice testers work faster.
as native, hybrid and Web Android applications. It enables access to device data,
which allows testers to test for user experience in landscape or portrait mode, as
well as gestures across devices.
You can also record a gesture on
one Android device that can be automatically tested on any other Android
device, said Kaul.
Orchestrate manual
and automated testing
QAComplete is a test management tool
that consolidates the planning, organizing and scheduling of all the tests associated with a release. With QAComplete,
QA teams can manage and run manual
and automated tests using a single interface. In addition, QA managers and project managers can get a consolidated
view of all testing activities by project as
well as across teams and across projects. Selenium users can run Selenium
scripts from within QAComplete and
take advantage of its reporting engine,
which provides robust, value-added features such as insight into test coverage.
QAComplete provides a central
place for managing all testing activity. It
also links testing to requirements and
defects, said Kaul. If youre using Selenium, you can get enhanced reporting
on your scripts that Selenium doesnt
provide.
Learn more at www.smartbear.com. z
Lisa Morgan
tool sprawl causes, individuals and

teams will not forfeit their favorite tools
without a fight. If the company or a
team mandates the use of a replacement product that is hard to learn, hard
to use and hard to deploy, it will likely
be underutilized if not circumvented
entirely. Given the ever-shrinking
nature of software delivery cycles,
enterprises increasingly expect new
products to complement their existing
environments without disrupting the
current processes.
A good process for a developer is
not necessarily a good process for a QA,
and yet you need to correlate these
processes for testing efficiently, said
Kaul. One way to do that is to choose a
solution that supports users with different skill sets and that can be easily customized to suit the role and individual
users preferences.
DevOps shows that

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the attention it
deserves.
Its a complex world
The days of developing a single application for a single platform are gone.
Over the past two decades, the proliferation of operating systems, platforms
and devices has accelerated, and the
trend is going to continue. Meanwhile,
software teams will be expected to
deliver software even faster, without
sacrificing product quality despite the
growing complexity.
If you want to develop software
faster, you have to test smarter, said
Kaul. The only way you can avoid testing becoming a bottleneck is to have
insight across all your testing processes
and integrate test automation earlier in
the life cycle. Both of those things will
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SDT308 page 34-38.qxd_Layout 1 11/19/14 4:32 PM Page 34
Finding
a fit for
autism in
testing
One company is helping people
with disorder overcome social barriers
and tap into their abilities for recall, recognition
ntense focus, sharp memory and

pattern recognition are some of the
traits that a great software tester
has to have. It so happens that those
traits are prominent in individuals on
the autism spectrum.
Autism is a term used to describe
complex disorders of brain development, and a person with autism often
experiences difficulties with social
interaction, communications and imagination. But they also often shine in
areas of visual skills, music, math and
art, according to the advocacy organization Autism Speaks.
There are many talents a person
with autism can bring to the workforce,
but they often have difficulty landing
jobs. According to Autism Speaks,
about 85% of people who have autism

in the United States are currently
unemployed or underemployed. One
company is not only trying to help
change that, but is doing so by training
autistic individuals to become the next
generation of software testers.
Meticulon is a social enterprise
organization, located in Calgary, Alta.,
that prepares individuals on the autism
spectrum for a software testing career,
and also helps them find jobs after
training.
Preparing for the workforce

The idea for Meticulon arose when
Russ Peardon, a member of the companys advisory board and cofounder of
Snirt Labs, saw the kinds of challenges
his son, who has autism, was facing

after high school as he started to enter
the workforce.
We became aware of some companies internationally that were employing people with autism in software testing, and after having looked at one of
those and seeing the power of it, it isnt
something you can walk away from and
say That looks nice. You have to make
it happen, so that is what got us going,
he said.
An autistic person often has two
skills that are particularly useful to software testing: a great memory and an
ability to match patterns.
It is not that every person with
autism has these skills, but it is no question that they are going to be much
SDT308 page 34-38_Layout 1 11/19/14 4:37 PM Page 35
December 2014
SD Times
35
Photos courtesy of Meticulon.
www.sdtimes.com
Meticulons assessments
determine not just
competency but motivation.
Becoming a Meticulon Consultant
more prominent in people with autism

and much stronger when [the skills] are
present, Peardon said.
An individual with autism may have
a better memory when performing certain tasks than a neurotypical person
or a person without autism. My son,
for example, can go back and recite verbatim some story we read to him when
he was 4 years old, said Peardon. He
pretty much remembers everything he
reads and is very visual. Thats something that is very common in high-functioning autism. You tell them something or they see something and then it
is just there.
The ability to pattern-match
requires an attention to detail, repeticontinued on page 36 >
When Meticulon is evaluating Consultants to join its program, it is not only looking for
natural abilities such as attention to detail, repetition and sequencing, but also an interest in the technology industry, according to Joy Hewitt, chief employment coach at
Meticulon.
The Meticulon assessment is a modified version of a European assessment toolkit
used by Passwerk, a similar company located in Belgium that helped Meticulon get started. The assessment starts off with an interview, and after the interviews are completed
the organization chooses approximately 12-14 people to continue onto one day of testing in areas such as logic, aptitude and personality traits.
Im looking for honest and literal answers, Hewitt said. I disregard body language
and eye contact, yet I still look for aspects such as motivation levels and interest in IT.
After evaluating the results, Meticulon selects a maximum of seven Consultants to
continue in its three-week assessment session. That session includes a variety of tasks,
which range from computer skills to social skills. During the three weeks, Meticulon
tracks and records every observation in a system called the Candidate Assessment and
Learning Matrix (CALM).
We simulate various work conditions to observe individual responses, and we alter
schedules, seating arrangements, time restrictions, etc., again to test for stress, reactions and modifications every individual has to a variety of employment situation possibilities, Hewitt said.
The information from CALM is then used to develop what Meticulon calls a MindMap
for each candidate in order to provide him or her and potential employers an understanding of the candidate as a worker. A MindMap is meant to serve as a representation
of a candidate and covers areas of work ethic, handling tasks, accuracy, efficiency, mindfulness, authority and teamwork, dealing with autism, physical appearance, sensitivity,
communication, social relations, temperaments, and anything else Meticulon feels necessary to include.
Each task reveals aspects of qualities and attributes specific to our MindMap development: a guide showing our observations to determine areas where they excelled,
their level of skills and include suggestions to challenges that may require additional
coaching, said Hewitt.
Once assessment is completed, Consultants go onto training, which includes learning
software testing skills and also an internship period to give candidates hands-on experience.
Besides our outstanding assessment and training programs, we also provide job
coaches to offer various tools and manage every step of the employment relationship,
Christina Mulligan
Hewitt said. z
36
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
tion and sequencing, all of which are

very important in software testing. An
autistic person can quickly spot patterns as if they were highlighted for
them, said Peardon.
So if autistic individuals have many
advantages over a neurotypical person,
why is it so hard for them to get a job?
The problem is that they cant sell themselves, according to Nigel Chanter,
Meticulon board member and cofounder
of Snirt Labs.
A good example is in an interview
when an employee asks, Why should I
hire you? Most neurotypical people
take that as a chance to sell themselves,
while an autistic person thinks How
can I possibly answer that question, I
dont know who the other candidates
are, and the interview process trips
them up, he said.
Meticulon takes on a group of autistic
individuals every year to mold them into
software testersor as the organization
calls them: Meticulon Consultants.
In many ways this is less about finding the one best candidate, but trying to
make sure that any candidates we take

on will be happy and successful once
placed in regular work environments,
said Chanter.
How to be a Consultant
To be eligible to become a Meticulon
Consultant, the organization conducts a
three-week assessment process that
involves testing, interviews and observation of collaboration in a group setting.
During the assessment, we give
over 45 tasks, and each task has a purpose, said Joy Hewitt, chief employment coach at Meticulon. We observe
and evaluate any of their assignments,
and we put them into different situations like working in a cubicle or doing
team projects, and we track everything
with all that information.
The information is used to create a
Consultants MindMap, which is a
unique profile created by Meticulon
that displays the Consultants talents,
skills, required accommodations, ideal
work environment and any suggestions,
according to Hewitt.
On the technical side, the organiza-
tion has a chief technology coach whose

job it is to train the new Consultants.
We teach them the business of testing the software and retesting, regression testing when new releases come
out, we teach them how to use common
bug reporting tools, how to interact
with the software development team,
how to write test cases, how to refine
them, how to retest the fix, said Peardon. A lot of those things to be truthful
are not the most glamorous part of the
IT industry, and it is very difficult to
keep a neurotypical person in those
jobs and executing them well. But for
an autistic person, they just love it in
many cases.
Peardon and Chanters startup
company, Snirt Labs, became a big
part of the screening process. The
Consultants are provided with old
buggy Snirt Labs software releases as
part of the training program so that
the technology coach knows in
advance what types of bugs the Consultants are going to find.
Occasionally they surprise us with a
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SDT308 page 34-38_Layout 1 11/19/14 4:37 PM Page 37
www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
Overcoming misconceptions
associated with autism
When Mackenzie Whitney, 25, graduated from the University of Alberta in

2008 with a bachelors degree in science
and a specialization in mathematics, he
faced a harsh reality that many college
graduates experience: the inability to
find a job.
It is a very difficult market right
now simply because you never get any
feedback after you hand in a resume to
a certain company, he said. There is
no Here is something you could have
done better with your resume.
But Whitney had a bigger challenge
that most other college graduates dont
have to deal with: overcoming the misconceptions of being on the autism
spectrum.
The important thing to note about
people on the spectrum is that each of
them have many diverse skills and that
you shouldnt judge many based on one
particular example, he said. A common misconception is that people on
the spectrum have similar traits and
temperaments, which is not the case.
Whitney found part-time
work in retail, graph keeping
and tutoring, but was frustrated because he wanted to put
his education to good use and
do meaningful work. It wasnt
until he heard about Meticulon on the news that he had
the opportunity to do so.
They were able to accurately assess who I am through
their detailed and rigorous
screening process and training, Whitney said. It is an invaluable resource
for anyone on the autistic spectrum.
The process of going through even the
training allowed me to form a more
complete picture of myself in terms of
whom I am as a worker.
Through Meticulon, Whitney was
able to land a two-month contract as a
software tester at Coverity. While he
Mackenzie Whitney, left, a Meticulon

Consultant, meets M.P. Mike Lake at World
Autism Awareness Day in Ottawa, above.
wasnt asked to stay on longer after his

contract, it was only due to a lack of
communication; Coverity expected
Whitney to have a lot more developeroriented knowledge, he said.
I felt like I was fitting in; there was
no stigma toward my condition, he
said. My employer was very impressed
with my performance, despite my lack
of developer knowledge, and my per-
sistence to learn continually on the job,

especially on difficult subjects that
would be only expected for developers
to know.
Whitney will be starting a threemonth contract as a software tester for
Palantir, a computer software provider.
Meticulon expects the contract to be
extended after the three months.
I am very excited for this new
opportunity, Whitney said. With this
new contract coming up, it is another
opportunity to showcase my skills and
hopefully impress them. z
37
38
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
Autism in the workplace

One of the biggest problems a person on the autism spectrum
faces is the lack of understanding by people and potential employers of what being on the spectrum actually means, according to
Tiffany Johnson, doctoral student at Pennsylvania State
Universitys College of Business.
Johnson, along with her advisor Aparna Joshi,
an associate professor of management and organization at Penn State, have been researching what
organizations can do to be more inclusive for people on
the spectrum for the past three years.
From what our research shows, it seems that people dont
understand the social behaviors that are associated with people on
the spectrum, and they think the diagnosis is associated with their
ability to work well and perform well, and typically that is not the
case, Johnson said.
Based on their research, she recommended the following things
organizations can do to include a person on the autism spectrum
in its workforce:
Creating organizational fit: The organizational culture plays a
really big role in whether or not somebody that is on the autism
spectrum can, first, find a job and, second, keep a job, said Johnson. When I say fit, I am talking about things like what is acceptable in terms of social behaviors, in terms of what sort of social
support a person is able to get at work from coworkers and supervisors and leaders, and also in terms of what those coworkers and
leaders understand autism to be.
Creating awareness: A lot of times you have a stigma around
bug that wasnt previously found in the

release, said Peardon.
In addition, Meticulon works with
Consultants on their social skills. With
methodologies such as agile and
DevOps gaining in prominence, building software has become a team game
for some businesses. And while social
interaction is often an obstacle for
autistic individuals, Peardon said it
really doesnt become a problem at
work.
One of the interesting things that
Ive found is once you sit down and
start working together, it really isnt a
different experience, he said. What
you see across the table are people who
have an unusual intense focus on a project, but when you start talking about
the work, it is as if all those social skill
issues melt away and you are just really
talking to a coworker.
Currently, Meticulon has been able
to find employment for six of its Consultants, and it said 12 more will be
employed by the end of the year. The
the label of autism, and people have these misconceptions that

lead to mistreatment at work, said Johnson. Creating awareness is really an important first step. Just being open to learning
about the autism spectrum disorder and what that means in
terms of employment.
Take action: It is not only about being aware, but demonstrating some of the behaviors that you do value, said Johnson.
Remember that people on the spectrum are people too:
This person is still a person who wants to work, and if they
are showing they are committed to that job and organization,
then they should have a chance to work there, said Johnson. If
they have the necessary skills to complete that task and perform well, then they should not be taken out of the running to
work there.
Make accommodations if necessary: Everyone on the spectrum is different, according to Johnson. This means that not
everyone is going to need adjustments at work, but there are
some things organizations can do to make a person on the spectrums work environment more comfortable. According to her,
those include offering a separate room to go to if they are experiencing sensory overload, changing the lighting so they dont
experience sensory overload, allowing them to take a break if
they feel like theyve engaged in too much informal social interaction, and assigning a coworker to them that they can trust to
ask for help.
Johnson notes that these are only a small example
of what organizations can do. Each person comes
with his or her own individual needs, she said. z
Christina Mulligan
organization has only been in operation

for a year, and aims to have 50 autistic
software testers employed within three
years.
The participants are just so thrilled
to have this type of employment that
lines up quite nicely with their skills,
said Peardon. We have one tester who,
at her one-month mark [of] being
employed, was performing as well as
someone who had been in the company
for six months.
Sometimes companies must make
accommodations in order to employ
autistic software testers, but Peardon
said theyre small and are overall better
for the company.
The accommodations are most
often related to environmental sensitivitiesfor example, reducing strong
smells like perfume or loud noises, he
said. It depends on the individual. In
general, you also want to manage
change a little more carefully to avoid
stress. Ironically, all these things are
good for your neurotypical staff as
well.
Aside from working

with Consultants to place them into
software testing careers, Meticulon
also wants to help found more organizations to train autistic people in software testing. In about six months,
Meticulonalong with Passwerk, an
organization in Belgium that helped
Meticulon get startedplans to
achieve this by open-sourcing its business model, training materials and software used for evaluation.
We dont see it as a competitor situation, said Peardon. The need is so
great in terms of...employment and the
need for good quality software testing.
We want to make it easier for an organization to hire people with autism without needing someone like Meticulon to
help them. The main thing is you have
the opportunity to Read this story on
hire an employee who
sdtimes.com
is going to be a superior software tester and
it wont [take] much
on your end to get
that. z
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SDT308 page 40-42,44_Layout 1 11/19/14 5:15 PM Page 40
40
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
Scaling enterp
Experts explain why more
organizations are switching
development paradigms
or years businesses have been practicing agile, seeing notable success
in time to market, productivity and
creativity at the team level. Now
they want to expand the scope of those
benefits.
If you asked development teams a
year or two ago to identify the biggest
agile obstacle, most of them would have
said getting management on the same
page, according to Bill Portelli, CEO of
CollabNet. But as management is beginning to understand the process, they are
looking to leverage it even more.
Agile is graduating from a discussion of what Forrester calls efficacy,
said Portelli. Yesterdays agile was
more about Continuous Integration
and user stories, and now it has
emerged into what the executives want
to see. They are interested in business
outcomes and value streams.
To get more out of agile, businesses
are starting to scale it from the team
level up to the enterprise. Scaling agile
is different in an enterprise context,
according to Lee Cunningham, director
of enterprise agile enablement at VersionOne. According to him, at the team
level, scaling agile involves adding additional cross-functional teams around a
common business or product goal,
whereas scaling enterprise agile

includes operational, financial and cultural aspects. Enterprise agile also
emphasizes individuals, interactions,
working software, responsiveness to
change, and customer collaboration.
There is a difference between scaling agile and enterprise agile, said
Cunningham. Scaling simply means
we are adding some agile capacity, and
you do that without really affecting the
entire enterprise. We see a lot of enterprises that are scaling have a lot of
teams, but their entire business enterprise isnt really brought into the principles and practices. You can certainly
have scaled agile without being enterprise, but if you have enterprise agile, it
is certainly going to involve scaling.
The business and business agility

The reason why so many organizations
are starting to transform their business
to agile is because it is becoming a safe
bet, according to Ryan Martens,
founder and CTO of Rally.
It is obvious it is working, he said.
The capacity and experience of people
in our industry have gone up as we have
been at this for a good solid decade.
And there are more people who have
some real success under their belt that
gives organizations confidence in being
able to move forward and make a commitment. They got the right people,
theyve seen it work and they feel pressure to move.
Transforming an entire business to
agile takes time, persistence and mon-
www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
rprise agile
delighting customers, and the way you
delight customers is you deliver more
stuff to them faster, and the stuff is
actually more relevant to what they
want, he said.
How to scale enterprise agile
ey, so why are more businesses going

through with it? It is worth the
headache in the long run, according to
Chris Hefley, CEO of LeanKit.
In any organization, being agile is a
business decision, he said. When
implemented well, agile can provide
faster innovation, cost savings, riskmanagement advantages, and better
organizational alignment toward a common purpose. Taking the values from
the Agile Manifesto and applying them
to other parts of the organization can
have similar benefits.
Businesses are starting to realize
that there is a disconnect between how
they deliver their products and services
and how they are thinking about business in general, according to Ver-
sionOnes Cunningham. We look at

agile not as an enabler of software
development as much as we look at it as
an enabler of the business, he said.
Bringing those concepts of individual interactions, focusing less on utilization and more on throughput,
focusing less on projects and more on
products I think is where the business
mindset is going, and agile is a means
of delivering products and services as a
natural fit for that.
It really is about adaptability, according to Eric Wittman, general manager of
developer tools at Atlassian. With the
market changing so quickly, organizations can respond more quickly and be
relevant at the same time, he explained.
At the end of the day, it is about
While agile at the team level has had

proven successes, those successes are
small compared to having agile at the
enterprise level. An entire enterprise
agile transformation is not easy; there is
no one-size-fits-all approach when it
comes to scaling enterprise agile, but
there are some important factors organizations should understand when it
comes to the transition process.
It is not really about the destination;
it is about the journey and how do you
sustain that for a long period of time,
said Rallys Martens. The way to get the
business agile is to get it to focused on a
culture of continuous innovation and
continuous improvement. Thats probably the only way because you cant get
there overnight, and where it is constantly moving as the tools and the organizational structures and the ways in
which we do stuff are constantly changing as the technology is changing. It is
kind of a never-ending hill climb.
While scaling agile can be arduous,
there are certain things experts recommend a business do to make the transition process easier on the organization
and its employees. Those recommendations include:
Leadership needs to embrace
the change. When an organization
undergoes a transformation, it is important that the leadership stands behind
it, according to VersionOnes Cunningham. Not only buying into it, but also
being able to express the vision so people understand not only that we are
41
42
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
making a change, but why we are making this change and why it is important, he said.
According to LeanKits Hefley, if
management doesnt own agile, then an
organization risks making only localized
improvements to a small part of itself,
which are unlikely to last. The best ways
to gain management buy-in are to clearly
articulate the business benefits of agile,
provide greater visibility and predictability, and then prove it with data, he said.
Figure out where you want to
start. Some organizations make the
mistake of biting off more than they can
chew, according to VersionOnes Cunningham. When starting a transformation, an organization should figure out
where it wants to start first.
More often than not, it is a good
practice to identify which sort of vertical slice of the organization we want to
pilot this in, he said. That pilot, if you
will, can experience agile and kind of
fail fast and learn real quickly, and then
those learnings can be leveraged as we
start to expand and scale agile throughout the organization.
Start small. You are going to want
to start in much smaller bite-size chucks
with specific teams or specific organizations that either have done a little of this
in the past or they are more attuned to
being able to embrace this way of working, said Atlassians Wittman. If you
want to have small successes you can
showcase, make them successful and
then you can see how that will start to
percolate through the organization. And
sometimes when people see another
team being successful with a new way of
working, they will adopt it without you
even having to push them. It ends up
being much like a snowball effect.
Customize your process to fit
your organization. Where people
fail the most is they will take a framework, and because it is documented
and it feels really comfortable, they will
say This is our process, and they will
try to use that process verbatim instead
of customizing it to their organization,
said Steve Elliott, founder and CEO of
AgileCraft, a provider of software for
scaling agile in enterprises.
An agile and waterfall approach

If it is possible to do a pure agile approach, said Emmett Keeffe III, CEO and cofounder
of iRise, it is always his companys recommendation to do that. But for projects that just
cant get there, he said a little agile is better than no agile at all.
At the moment, were seeing a certain type of project where
agile can be done. Theyre the mobile projects and the digital
Web projects. Theyre very specific, he said.
But that only represents about 10% of a companys software
portfolio. How do we bring agility into customized billing or call
center projects, to scale it across the portfolio? You have to
leverage a hybrid approach. We are seeing a lot of organizations
land on sort of a hybrid methodology which is part agile and
part waterfall.
Simulations can help
Keeffes company iRise uses computer-aided simulation to companies become
help make its definition and design phases agile.
agile, says Keeffe.
I think it is an easier transformation because what you end
up doing is putting the production of the simulation and the collaborative design
process at the front end of waterfall, but the rest of the waterfall process you leave
relatively untouched, he said.
Maybe we shouldnt talk about agile. The right word is agility. Thats what the
business wants. Taking English out of the requirements definition process brings agiliChristina Mulligan
ty. Thats what were talking about in the world. z
Have an open platform. You really need to be able to adopt any type of
agile or any type of development
process or any type of tool framework,
said CollabNets Portelli. Have a tool
chain and process that is adaptable to
whatever your business needs are.
Dont let the tools drive the
process. Organizations that start by
finding the tool first and then the
process are scaling enterprise agile
backward, according to Elliott. The
tools should not drive the process, and
the limitations of the tools shouldnt
dictate how you are going to run that
process, he said.
It should be based off the frameworks you are using and the decisions
youve made on how you want to take
agile to your organization and drive it
through. The tooling is not going to make
you an effective organization in and of
itself; it can highlight problems and it can
help, but you really need both.
Take a holistic view. Taking a
holistic view of the organization as a
system and approaching all problems as
system problems, rather than people
problems, will align people and management toward improving the underlying system, said LeanKits Hefley.
Create a culture of collaboration. What you want to do is make it
easy for people to find codecode

meaning all the business aspects and all
the outputsand at the same time you
want to have it backed by a community, said Portelli. You want to have it
backed by people who have passion and
vision that will help you. The context is
having all the history.
According to Hefley, people need to
have a shared vision of the work, frequent conversations about the work,
and clear guides of risks and potential
roadblocks.
Have feedback loops. By quickly
delivering small chunks of value, teams
can adjust according to what theyve
learned and pave the way for greater
speed to market, innovation, and riskmanagement potential, said Hefley.
Seek out help. Moving to agile is
hard, not only for your software development teams but for all teams, said
Atlassians Wittman. It takes time. If
you are an executive or management or
on a team yourself, and you want to
embrace this new way of working, seek
out great examples where companies
have been successful and use those as
sort of catalyst for change. But also be
patient because it does take time.
Provide a rhythm. A regular heartbeat of delivery aligned across multiple
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44
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
may be good and some may not be

teams can focus the organization on good, but there is really no way to tell.
Enter evidence-based management
delivering value with the most coordinaof software development organizations.
tion and fewer delays, said Hefley.
Think about the transformation in Evidence-based management started in
phases and be patient. If you try to the medical profession to distinguish
reorganize an entire organization, between circumstantial and direct evichange the way you build software and dence, said Schwaber.
So we started taking that same idea
expect all of that to happen overnight,
then that is one way to fail, said Agile- saying, Hey, what if we did the same
Crafts Elliott. You have to do the thing with software? he said. We
transformation in phases. There has to could have something called evidencebe some thought on how you are going based management where we differentito transform the organization, and it ate between circumstantial evidence like
cant be a three-month timeframe. It lines of codes or story points and numhas to be over a couple of years where ber of bugs found, and direct evidence,
you get the framework in, you get the which would be measuring the outtools in, you get some success within comes of software organizations rather
your organization, and you figure out how to transform the Tools shouldnt drive the
process, tools, organization and
process, and limitations in tools
how people work together.
Rallys Martens advised figur- shouldnt dictate how to run
ing out a way to turn the trans- that process.
Steve Elliott, AgileCraft
formation into a road map, and
finding some reasonable incremental changes that can be made along
the way as milestones.
Does your approach work for you?

When it comes to agile, there are many
approaches an organization can take. It
can use lean, Scrum, Kanban, pure agile
or hybrid agile.
I often say that agile is like ice
cream, said CollabNets Portelli. Some
flavors of ice cream dont work for your
business. In fact, most of the organizations we work with at scale are at best
50% agile and then 50% something else.
Deciding what practice to pick
depends on the business and its goals;
what may work for one organization
may not work for another, and that can
be tricky because it is hard to tell what
method to take, according to Ken
Schwaber, founder of Scrum.org and
co-developer of the Scrum process.
There is no real measure in the
standard business sense of, Did you
guys do well with that initiative with all
that money you spent on Scrum or
agile? he said. This is problematic for
me in particular and everyone in the
agile initiative because we are starting
to see lots of fads coming in, and some
than the internal operations of them.

The importance of evidence-based
management is the ability to collect
direct measurements of outcomes when
an organization introduces a new
methodology or tool. It devises a set of
measurements that would reflect a value
that software is delivering to the organization, and it measures the change in
value to the organization, according to
Schwaber. It is the process of evaluating
current valuable outcomes, selecting the
outcomes to improve, identifying the
practices that will create these improvements, implementing those practices,
and evaluating the results.
Suddenly software is critical for the
way businesses compete and the way our
society interacts and works, and thats no
longer an expense, said Schwaber.
That is something which you survive or
fail with, and we are getting that pressure from our customers that they want
to know what the best thing to do is, and
they want some proof.
The three primary measures of evidence-based management for software

development organizations are:
1. Current value: How many dollars of revenue an organization is generating per employee, and how likely the
employees are going to continue creating value and customer satisfaction.
Thats an okay set of measurements for
any organization at any point in time,
said Schwaber. The problem is we had
companies that had great current value
that folded within five to 10 years.
Company after company that just did
great, and then five years later they
were broke. So we added two other legs
to this value that we are measuring:
time-to-market and ability to innovate.
2. Time to market: The ability to
bring new features,
functions and products
into customers hands.
3. Ability to innovate: Having a great
company, being able to
deliver products fast
and having great current value can be
meaningless if an organization cant
come up with sound ideas, according to
Schwaber. The ability to innovate looks
at a business entire product development budget, the percentage that goes
to maintenance, the usage index, and
defect density.
After all the measurements are taken,
they are added together into a weighted
calculation called an agility index. The
agility index reflects the state of an organizations value overall and in the marketplace, according to Schwaber.
We take all these metrics and we
add them together into one number
that is called an agility index, and it is a
number from 1 to 99.9, he said. It is
most heavily weighed toward current
value because obviously we are interested in the final outcome rather than
your time to market,
Read this story on
or ability to innovate,
sdtimes.com
but it has all three of
them amalgamated
into one number,
which hopefully goes
up. z
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SDT308 page 47,49,50,52.qxd_Layout 1 11/19/14 2:26 PM Page 47
www.sdtimes.com
BY ROB MARVIN
DFs have been around for a long

timemore than two decades, in
fact. As the platforms displaying
the format have evolved beyond a simple
desktop, more and more tools and components proliferate behind the scenes to
ensure those documents crisply render
and display on whatever application or
screen they pop up in.
Since its inception by Adobe in the
early 1990s, the Portable Document
Format has grown into an open-source
ISO standard, as well as the most popular and widely used document format
worldwide. To maintain relevance and
dominance through the age of the Web
(and now the age of mobile and the
cloud), there is increasingly greater
variety: more SDKs, more toolkits,
more drivers, providers and services.
These days, PDF component technology is anything but simple.
As the technology has evolved,
there are so many players now in the
market that there are many, many ways
of processing PDF files, said Dany
Amiouny, CTO of Amyuni. Often,
developers and users are unaware that
not all PDFs are the same. A PDF that
looks fine onscreen is not necessarily
well structured.
According to Amiouny, the duty of
PDF component and toolkit providers
today is pursuing a well-structured PDF
that stays optimized for processing
regardless of how the technology and

platforms around it change over time.
As the range of applications and use cases for PDFs continues to expand, he
explained, the elasticity and malleability
of the format must change with it.
A few years from now, that same
PDF will be archived, and it has to be
delivered with whatever version of
Acrobat Reader and any other viewer
thats out there, Amiouny said. Its
very important to know if the PDFs
being generated are well-structured
and optimized, not just on the screen.
An increasingly crowded market

As PDFs have been asked to present
more types of content on different operating systems and devices, a market that
once was easily navigable has turned into
a veritable bazaar of providers. Different
niches have emerged as companies home
in on particular aspects of PDF components and tooling, be it PDF creation,
conversion, rasterization, optimization,
security, or a more comprehensive solution across one or more platforms.
Today there is much more competition, said Amiouny. There are many
open-source tools out there, many
more players in the PDF market. When
it started there were maybe four or five
different types of components, and
today there are many, many more. With
all these players in the PDF market,
everyone tries to differentiate in some
particular areas. There are so many
December 2014
SD Times
things we can do with a PDF that not

all the players do everything perfectly,
and its difficult to be strong in all the
areas of working with PDFs.
PDF usage by corporations and individuals has skyrocketed, driving a proportional demand for PDF products in
all contexts, according to Gerald Holmann, president of Qoppa Software,
including end-user products as well as
back-end production and processing.
As PDF processes have become more
complex, he explained, the demand for
PDF components has increased as well,
as they provide more flexibility than traditional turnkey solutions.
We see commercial components
moving toward more complex PDF
functions as a way for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors as well as from open-source
components, Holmann said. The PDF
format is fairly static, so we dont see
much change in that direction. However, PDF documents are being used in
new ways by businesses and consumers,
which will provide new opportunities
for PDF functions and products.
PDFs across platforms

On top of the growing list of things
PDFs and PDF components are asked
to do, technology providers have also
been forced to grapple with the evolution of the platform landscape and the
move to different mediums.
47
www.sdtimes.com
A guide to
PDF component offerings
n Accusoft: Accusofts PDF Xpress
empowers developers to boost application functionality with easy PDF creation, editing, and the highest level of
PDF compression available on the marketas much as 90%. Quickly compress
one PDF (or an entire library) with just
one parameter change to boost display
and transmission speed while dramatically reducing archival footprint. Leverage PDF Xpress to build a PDF portfolio
of multiple documents and document
types.
n ActivePDF: Over 14 years, ActivePDF
has developed and refined a comprehensive collection of PDF automation tools
that make development easy. ActivePDF
helps avoid delays, downtime and
headaches. More than 23,000 satisfied
customers have chosen ActivePDF, from
startups to Fortune 100 companies.
n Adobe: A company defined by its market-leading PDF technology, Adobe
offers a complete PDF component offering around its Acrobat PDF reader,
including Adobe ExportPDF and the
Adobe PDF Pack for converting and combining PDF files, and moving its entire
PDF management suite to the cloud with
Acrobat XI Pro for the Adobe Creative
Cloud.
n Amyuni: Amyuni provides developers and system administrators with highperformance PDF conversion and processing tools. Certified for Windows
desktops and servers, Amyuni PDF Converter enables developers to easily integrate powerful PDF and PDF/A functionality into their applications with just a
few lines of code. Amyuni PDF Creator
produces optimized PDF documents and
seamlessly integrates with COM, .NET,
WinRT and Windows Phone applications.
n Aspose: Aspose creates file format
APIs that help .NET and Java developers
work with documents. Aspose.Pdf for
.NET and Aspose.Pdf for Java are APIs
for creating, editing and converting PDF
files. They support a wide range of fea-
tures, from simple PDF file creation,

through layout and formatting changes,
to more complex operations like managing PDF forms, security and signatures.
Asposes PDF APIs help speed up development with comprehensive functionality, free trials and responsive support.
n ceTe Software: ceTes DynamicPDF
product line, including the Core Suite,
Merger, ReportWriter, Generator, Viewer,
Rasterizer, PrintManager and Converter,
provides developers access to a complete integrated PDF solution to create,
interact with, transform and export
PDFs. The DynamicPDF libraries and
components have functionality for C#
and .NET, Java, COM and ActiveX.
n ComponentOne: ComponentOne, a
division of GrapeCity, provides UI controls for application development. Its
offering includes PDF controls for creating and viewing PDF documents in Windows, Web and Windows Store applications without requiring users to install
Adobe Acrobat. With ComponentOnes
PDF controls for WinForms, Silverlight,
WPF, ASP.NET and WinRT XAML, users
may generate and view full-featured
reports with encryption, compression,
outlining, hyperlinking, attachments, and
everything else PDF users need.
n ComponentPro: Ultimate PDF for
.NET is a 100%-managed PDF document
component that helps you add PDF capabilities in.NET applications. With a few
lines of code, developers can create a
complex PDF document from scratch, or
load an existing PDF file without using any
third-party libraries or ActiveX controls.
The Ultimate PDF component also offers
many features, including drawing text,
image, tables and other shapes, compression, hyperlinks, security, and custom
fonts. PDF files created using the Ultimate
PDF component are compatible with all
versions of Adobe Acrobat as well, as is
the free version of Acrobat Viewer from
Adobe.
December 2014
SD Times
Desktop application developers, Web

developers, mobile developers and cloud
application developers all want to integrate PDF functionality into their apps.
That may mean utilizing PDF component toolkits for iOS, OS X, Windows,
Windows Phone, Android and the Web,
working with programming languages
and frameworks from Java, .NET and
C++ to ActiveX, JavaScript, C#, Objective-C and HTML. The result, according
to Catherine Andersz, director of business development at PDFTron, is a fragmented PDF toolkit market in an
increasingly cross-platform world.
We find that developers dont want
to use one toolkit on Windows and one
toolkit on iOS, and another toolkit on
Android, Andersz said. A cross-platform API allows consistent rendering
and viewing. The same file that opens
on iOS can open on Android and all the
other platforms.
The problem out there with some

toolkits is that there are so many preproducers out there producing so many
types of PDF files, and they tend to corrupt it into files that shouldnt even be
called PDFs, really. A lot of the files are
just not processable or viewable via different toolkits. We need to make sure,
as much as possible, to adhere to the
PDF specification to assure that we
support and we create PDFs to the
most compliant way possible.
The specification Andersz referred
to is the ISO 32000-1 standard and its
subsets, also known as PDF 1.7. The
standard, officially published by the
ISO in 2008, was based on the PDF 1.7
specification Adobe released royaltyfree in 2007. A new version of the standard, codenamed PDF 2.0, is under
49
50
SD Times
December 2014
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PDF component offerings

n Glyph & Cog: Glyph & Cog offers a full
line of software components designed to
help developers add PDF capability into
their applications. Functionality includes
PDF viewing, printing, text extraction,
and more with cross-platform support
for Windows, Mac and Linux. Glyph &
Cogs newest product is XpdfWidget/Qt,
a PDF viewer widget for the Qt framework, suitable for desktop and embedded use.
n LEADTOOLS: LEADTOOLS Document
Imaging toolkits include a full suite of PDF
SDK technology for viewing, editing, creating and converting PDF and Office formats. The Document Viewer framework
includes an advanced set of tools such as
text searching, annotations, memory-efficient paging, inertial scrolling and vector
display. Developers can implement comprehensive PDF reading, writing and editing with support for the extraction of text,
hyperlinks, bookmarks and metadata, as
well as updating, splitting and merging
pages from existing PDF documents.
n ORPALIS:
GdPicture.NET by
ORPALIS offers extended support of the
PDF format for .NET (C# and VB.NET)
and non-managed applications written in
VB6, Delphi, MS Access and more. Its
numerous features include full Unicode
support, PDF/A generation, digital signature support, PDF merging and splitting,
PDF modification, PDF rasterization, and
PDF creation with interactive form fields.
With GdPicture.NET, you can also repair
corrupted PDFs, add/extract fonts, and
draw barcodes and annotations on documents.
n PDFTron: PDFTron provides powerful cross-platform PDF APIs easing app
development on all major mobile and
desktop platforms with consistent, highquality output, and top-notch performance on even the most complex files.
PDFNet SDK APIs can be accessed from
any language/platform (Xamarin/C#,
JavaScript, C++, JAVA, Objective-C, etc.)
providing support for annotation, collaboration, forms, digital signing, editing, printing, file conversion, redaction, and more.
PDFTrons WebViewer enables viewing and
embedding of PDF, Office, and other formats in any HTML5 app on any device.
n Persits Software: Persits Softwares
AspPDF and AspPDF.NET are featurepacked server components for managing Adobe PDF documents for classic
ASP and .NET environments, respectively. Their simple and intuitive programming interface enables a Web application to perform many useful PDF-related
functions, such as form fill-in, HTML-toPDF, and PDF-to-image conversion, text
extraction, stamping, digital signing,
automatic printing, barcode generation,
and many others, in just a few lines of
script. Free fully functional 30-day evaluation versions are available.
n Qoppa: Qoppa Software offers
an extensive suite of PDF libraries
and visual components that cover
all PDF processing needs. PDF
functions include creation and
modification, assembly, conversion to images and
HTML, automated printing,
encryption and digital signatures,
form fields, viewing and markup, optimization, and a lot more. Qoppa products
provide the highest level of performance
and reliability and are 100% Java, so
they run on all servers and desktop operating systems.
n TallComponents: TallComponents
offers reliable and proven .NET class
libraries to create, modify, convert, read,
print and render PDF documents. The
libraries are written entirely in C#, have
no external dependencies such as Adobe
Reader, and are characterized by an
intuitive API combined with knowledgeable and fast support.
n
WebSupergoo: WebSupergoos
ABCpdf .NET is designed for a combination of maximum power and ease of use,
going directly to PDF for blazing speed.
ABCpdf supports a wide range of input
and output formats, from PDF, HMTL and
XPS to SVG, EPS and DOCX. The product
is fully color-space-aware for importing,
construction and rendering, and provides
sophisticated operations for the analysis,
deconstruction and reconstruction of
documents. z
development by the ISO and is set to be

published sometime in 2015 or 2016.
Amiouny sees the standard as a
calming force in PDF evolution, and
one that sets the technology up for stability in the long run. The technology
has evolved very quickly the last few
years, especially since PDFs became an
ISO standard, he said.
We dont think PDFs will evolve as
much as they have in the past few years.
There have been some proponents for
changing things in the PDF area, but
we havent seen much action aside from
working toward PDF 2.0. So we see
that, fortunately for everyone, the technology has stabilized quite a lot. There
may be improvement, but not so many
drastic changes going forward.
Compliance with the PDF standard is
one way for PDF components and toolkits to ensure a PDF renders and
optimizes correctly regardless of the files its
dealing
with,
but
Andersz and PDFTron
CTO Ivan Nincic believe
thats only part of the puzzle
when dealing with a file that
may be completely broken.
One problem with PDFs is that they
can be huge, said Nincic. They can be
print-quality files or very large in file size
and very slow to render. So its essential
that when you put the document on the
Web, it can be efficiently viewed on any
device. It goes beyond compliance. People are accustomed to the notion that if
Acrobat can display a PDF, your application should too. Just implementing a
PDF standard is a small part of implementing support for all the incompatible
and broken PDF files out there.
Ultimately, Andersz and Nincic
believed developers should seek out a
cross-platform PDF tooling solution
optimized for the Web along with different mobile devices. The availability
of cheap PDF solutions such as Apples
built-in iOS PDF viewer provide developers convenient solutions, but according to Andersz, this leaves developers at
the mercy of third-party support.
We see a lot of these single-platform
52
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
What should developers look for in a good PDF component solution?

Dany Amiouny, president and CTO of Amyuni: Developers need
to learn that its more about the internal structure of a PDF file.
Before choosing a PDF driver, developers should at least understand the basics. When comparing PDF drivers, they need to be
able to understand whether the PDF is well-structured and
optimized or if it has issues.
In many cases, PDFs are generated off servers. If it
takes one second or five seconds to generate the
PDF, driver performance can make a huge difference on a server that is generating thousands
and thousands of PDFs every day. Its about comparing the output, but also the performance: In
how many seconds or milliseconds am I able to generate a PDF file? If youre generating two PDFs a day,
it doesnt matter. If Im building an application thats
going through servers or multiple users at the same
time, its important to compare the performance of the
libraries. Before really engaging and trying to find the right
driver, developers need to understand the product itself.
Elodie Tellier, sales manager and COO of ORPALIS: As developers ourselves, we build the kind of PDF tools were looking
for. They need to work fast on large documents, on any CPU
and to work in multi-thread applications. The idea is to gain
time without losing in quality and precision. The code writing
based on the API should also be intuitive.
Catherine Andersz, director of business development at
PDFTron: When looking at toolkits, its very important to do a
thorough evaluation, making sure it works across the whole
toolkits that build things on top and are

really just wrappers for third-party and
sometimes even open-source technologies, she said. So theres a bit of a disconnect with customers. They see an
inexpensive toolkit and wonder how
thats possible, how the technology is
different. Theres a gap in understanding that some toolkits are built from the
ground up and are compliant to the
PDF specification in every possible way,
and other toolkits are just wrappers.
The mobile, Web and cloud frontiers

In the cloud, PDFs are becoming
more integral with the Web experience, said Nincic. In the past, PDFs
were kind of just a binary blob that you
required a browser plug-in to access
and view. Thats all changing. More and
more websites are offering PDF viewing and cooperation experiences as an
integral part of the website itself.
A decade ago, the PDF ecosystem
was much smaller, and Adobe was the
test suite of files that end users might be working with. For
example, engineering documents can be very, very complex. If
you just stick to a test on some basic files, it may work but if
you do a proper test with lots of heavy, intensive documents,
youll see what the true performance of the toolkit is. So evaluation with a full test suite is always very important. If
they dont have such a test suite, ask the vendor to provide you with some sample files and how it performs
on different complex documents.
Ivan Nincic, CTO of PDFTron: In connection to
that, I would say that inevitably there will be PDFspecific issues encountered that are so complex
that there will be questions about files not rendering or problems with crashes. It is essential
that developers investigate the support offered by
a company.
Gerald Holmann, president of Qoppa Software: Above all
else, developers should be looking for stability and robustness.
Additionally, the PDF format is very complex and supports hundreds of different features, so developers should be looking for
wide feature coverage in the products they select, to make
sure that they will be able to handle PDFs from all sources.
Most, if not all, document interchange in [business-to-business], [business-to-consumer] and [consumer-to-business]
uses PDF, so PDF handling and processing is an absolute necessity for doing business. PDF components provide the flexibility
to implement any PDF workflow according to specific needs. z
Rob Marvin
main player controlling the spec. The

ecosystem revolved around Acrobat,
which essentially became an ISO standard. In the years since, Apple has
adopted the PDF as a format in iOS
and the Mac, Google adopted the PDF
for printing, and even Microsoft introduced basic rendering in Windows 8.1.
Mobile, Web and cloud-based applications have made the PDF more common. On the developer side it demands
a higher level of functionality.
In the past decade, the need for
higher-level PDF features has grown
considerably, said ORPALIS sales manager and COO Elodie Tellier. Before,
you could find really good PDF SDKs
delivering a wide range of low-level
APIs. Now the developer requires more
sophisticated functionalities.
These intricate functional capabilities
are what will empower developers and
PDF component providers to keep up
with trends in the PDF market.
PDFTrons Andersz sees more businesses requiring a Web and mobile PDF
experience that works without hassle on

the various devices an end user may
have. When an enterprise switches from
a desktop or native mobile application to
a Web or cloud-based solution, the PDF
components and toolkits facilitating that
shift must be up for the challenge.
Its no longer possible to simply have
an iOS app. You cant depend on most
users having an iPad or iPhone, Andersz
said. Nowadays, the Android market is
equally strong and might override the
iOS market in some ways. There are still
lots of business users on desktop, especially in government and the financial
sector. The key is really to think, what
will help them adopt their applications
and their solutions across platforms? Yes,
you can offer native SDKs for all these
different platforms,
Read this story on
but the Web is really
sdtimes.com
starting to be the key
that really allows you to
code once and deploy
to all these devices via
the browser. z
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54
SD Times
December 2014
www.sdtimes.com
As the projects core matures,

enterprise distributions make headway
BY ALEX HANDY
our years have passed since the project to create an

open-source IT stack began between NASA and Rackspace. Two years have passed since the creation of the
OpenStack Foundation, the governing body behind the
large ecosystem of open-source projects that make up
OpenStack. The here and now of OpenStack resembles
much of what was promised early on: Large vendors like
HP, Red Hat, IBM and Mirantis are offering their own supported distributions of the platform.
Those big companies are turning

OpenStack into private cloud-management products, said Lauren Nelson,
senior analyst at Forrester Research.
There are private cloud suites that
have management tools, which have
OpenStack sitting beneath the product,
but you would not know it was there.
She cited IBM SmartCloud and HP
Cloud Service Automation (CSA) as one
solution, with another being HP
Helion as a pure distribution. These
www.sdtimes.com
are the types of products she points to

for enterprise adoption of OpenStack
because, she added, It is difficult for
enterprises to adopt [plain OpenStack].
More commonly, theyre using the full
private cloud suite.
In order to discuss this phenomenon
further, however, the terms must be
closely defined. OpenStack is primarily just a cloud platform, said Nelson.
It looks like whats exposed to a public
cloud user. I call that a platform. That
can sit beneath a private cloud suite.
She coined the term private cloud
suite to mean the combination of
something like OpenStack with higherlevel cloud-management tools like CAs
Opscenter or Ciscos Intelligent
Automation for Cloud.
That leaves OpenStack as the nuts
and bolts for large enterprise cloudmanagement suites. And in this regard,
the platform has come to compete with
VMwares offerings. If you look at
most private cloud suites today, they
have this ability to plug in whatever
[underlying platform the enterprise
has]. That could be vCloud automation
center, that could be a public cloud
platform, said Nelson.
Thats good news for companies
looking at OpenStack as the future of
their internal cloud platforms. In terms
of platforms that exist today, theyre
standardized on OpenStack, said Nelson. [Apache] CloudStack is still out
there, but its decreasing in numbers.
Theres also vCloud Director or vCloud
Automation Center. More commonly
we see [VMwares] vSphere being used
for some of its basic capabilities.
Thus, in four years, OpenStack has
Whats in a core?
Astonishingly enough, what constitutes
the core projects of OpenStack is still a
debatable topic. One aspect, which is not
under debate, is that the Compute projectNovais the center of the core.
More debatable are the other basic components, which have not been in development as long as Nova. Currently, the general consensus is that the core of
OpenStack consists of:
become the de facto open-source standard for internal cloud platform infrastructure, not unlike how Unix and then
Linux became the common platform
between the large enterprise vendors.
HP and IBM went from having their
own platforms, to having their own
Unixes, to having their own Linuxes
(sort of), to now having their own
OpenStack-based cloud-management
suites.
Thats not to say you cant just buy
OpenStack from a hot young company
still defining the market. Much in the
way Red Hat came to mean Linux,
Mirantis has come to mean OpenStack.
December 2014
SD Times
ment wins on what was considered

young, unproven software only two or
three years ago.
Distribution solutions
Though OpenStack is finally available
to enterprises with corporate support
and updates, it remains a complex beast
that brings an entirely new paradigm
into the data center. Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of virtualization and OpenStack at Red Hat, said
that OpenStack is not just a replacement for old systems; it fundamentally
rewrites the way a data center runs.
The reality is, in terms of pure tech-
In terms of [internal cloud]

platforms that exist today,
theyre standardized on OpenStack.
Lauren Nelson, Forrester
And yet, the two companies are now

directly competing, each with its own
enterprise distribution.
All this competition is great for the
enterprise manager who has to make a
choice. But even before picking a distribution, the underlying projects that
make up OpenStack offer compelling
uses on their own. No matter which distribution you choose, your options
when it comes to storage, networking
and processing are expanding every day
with projects like Gluster, Ceph and
Quantum, confirming the IT departn Compute (Nova)
n Identity Service (Keystone)
n Image Service (Glance)
This is only the core in as much as it is
the three pieces required to start up an
OpenStack virtual machine. As OpenStack grows, its entirely possible that
the core could be expanded to include:
n Networking (Neutron)
n Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic)
n Multiple Tenant Cloud Messaging
(Zaqar)
Alex Handy
nical scope, the nature of the problem

set here is broader by definition, he
said. The fundamental fabric of the
data center is being stitched together in
a new way. Its a function of the scope
that you can see some progress. From
our perspective, the adoption of OpenStack is going to be tightly tied to cloud
computing and the new application
architecture itself.
Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis, said
that while OpenStack changes how the
data center runs, it isnt entirely different from existing large enterprise software products in that its a big project
to install, run and configure the platform, just as it is to install an ERP or
new database layer. Thats not to say,
however, that OpenStack hasnt made
things easier.
OpenStack has come a very, very
long way, said Ionel. The power of
OpenStack is, at the same time, the
curse of OpenStack. The power is that
its incredibly flexible, so you can tailor
it in many different ways. That requires
a tremendous level of expertise in terms
55
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December 2014
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of what knobs to turn. Its extremely

configurable; it has hundreds and hundreds of configuration settings. Only
some of them are resolved in robust
production-grade deployments.
As a result, OpenStack anything will
be complicated. Theres no such thing as
a one-click deployment, said Ionel,
though he did point out that Mirantis
offers a simple, graphical installer for
OpenStack. The result of this complexity
is that distributions arent necessarily to
be judged by their pretty installers alone.
Imad Sousou is vice president of the
Software and Services Group at Intel
and general manager of the Intel Open
Source Technology Center. He is also a
gold-level director of the OpenStack
Foundation. He said that OpenStack
has improved tremendously from a
couple years ago. Two things happened
at the same time: One is the maturity of
OpenStack itself, but the second part is
you have reasonably good distributions
now.
Storage heats up at OpenStack

Object Storage (Swift) and Block Storage (Cinder) are both popular projects that have
been deployed by large enterprise clouds, such as Rackspace. But as OpenStack
matures, more storage options have become available, such as Red Hats Ceph and
Gluster, which cover all types of storage. Ceph, in fact, can store any type of data
thanks to gateway interfaces that allow the same back end to host objects, data, and
pure file system-style information on the same cluster.
Gluster, on the other hand, allows for the creation of a distributed file system that
can be spread across the world, without the need for partitioning or elaborate backup
strategies.
Alex Handy
We at Mirantis have been aware of

this for some time. We know these challenges, which is why Mirantis OpenStack works extremely well out of the
box [and] is easy to set up and configure. Its like configuring your car on the
Web: You have a beautiful orchestrator,
you push a button, and 30 minutes later
your cloud thats production-worthy
will be up and running.
Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of
infrastructure at Red Hat, said that
open-source communities, in general,
are organized around driving innova-
The fundamental fabric of the data

center is being stitched together in a
new way. OpenStack is going to be
tightly tied to cloud computing and
the new application architecture.
Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat
OpenStack is still a work in

progress, and I think the areas of
deployability and support and things
like that, right now, are still evolving,
said Sousou. I think its still [difficult]
unless you have decent and strong engineering resources to actually deploy it
and maintain it and so on. A year ago, it
wasnt possible to deploy without those
type of resources.
Whats most important in a distribution, said Ionel, is the stability of its
components. OpenStackthat is, the
upstream communitydoesnt test
OpenStack very hard, he said. Its not
their mission. They are not to blame.
They do some basic testing that is not
relevant to production use.
tion. For mission-critical deployments,

there needs to be someone like Red Hat
to take that and make it stable and give
it a life cycle. Gartner was complaining
about robustness of upstream [OpenStack] technologies from a supportability standpoint. Its going to get better,
but itll always be innovation first.
Umbrella of projects
Indeed, OpenStack has become the
place for innovative cloud services to
start and grow. Outside of OpenStack,
many in-cloud service companies, such
as Eucalyptus and Nimbula, long ago
gave up on their efforts to spread Amazon Web Services-like APIs into private
clouds. Instead of replicating Amazon,
OpenStack has become the place

where innovative new services are
being testedservices like Red Hats
storage services, Gluster, Ceph, and
Project Neutron (formerly known as
Project Quantum). Gluster is a multipetabyte distributed file system that
can be used to host numerous types of
workloads. Ceph is a combination
object, block and file storage system
that has been in the works for almost 10
years now. And Neutron was originally
the work of a software-defined networking company, Nicira. Neutron
allows OpenStack clouds to define their
own networking topology.
Underneath all of these sub-projects,
however, is still a somewhat nebulous
core that makes up OpenStack. Sousou
said that he has been pushing for a more
defined core of the platform from his
post in the OpenStack Foundation.
What we are working on at the
board level in the Foundation is to
define the core, he said. What does it
mean when you say OpenStack? Its
quite a large number of projects, and
not all of them youd consider core.
Sousou added that the goal is to
define the core so that distributions can
be evaluated and you can put an
OpenStack sticker on it. Thats important if multiple distributions are going
to coexist in the marketplace. If different versions of OpenStack are not compatible with one another, the whole
allure of OpenStack is lost.
Having consistent APIs and stable
APIs for the core is actually really
important, said Sousou. There are
quite a few open-source projects that
overlap with OpenStack. Thats great,
but it needs to be defined what constitutes core OpenStack so everybody
www.sdtimes.com
understands how they can add

capabilities in a way thats similar to Linux.
Ionel said that Mirantis is
heavily focused on evolving
and stabilizing the core of
OpenStack. We have such a
deep footprint all over the
core projects. We do have a
huge emphasis on networking
because we see networking as
the fundamental glue that
keeps the entire cloud together and is the biggest influence
on reliability performance and Mirantis' OpenStack distribution has helpers to ease installation.
scalability, he said.
Another very big emphasis
we have is at the applicationmanagement layer on top of
OpenStack. Virtually all of our
customers buy OpenStack not
for the sake of OpenStack;
theyre buying it to develop and
run applications on top. They
want to make it as accessible as
possible for developers. We
have a huge opportunity there;
a tremendous amount of value
can be created.
December 2014
SD Times
everybody is still doing the

work.
Thats echoed by Nelson, who said that many
early adopters were left
behind when OpenStack
upgrades were released.
The upgrade path is not
easy. I think a lot of people
that adopted OpenStack
early on realized its immature, and updates come
every couple months, and if
you put customer code into
it youll be stuck when its
time to upgrade, she said.
Ionel is convinced that
OpenStack is the technology that can drive enterprises to success in the
coming years. OpenStack
absolutely can become the
Android of the cloud data
center. It plays the same
role in the data center
space that Android is playing in the mobile space,
he said.
Thats the opportunity
here; we see accelerating
Work to be done
OpenStack has introduced mechanisms that assist in setting up clusters.
traction for that. We think
The future of OpenStack is
more and more of the
bright, but it is not without the flashing high availability and manageability, best brands in the world are the comlights of construction crews.
security and compliance, he said.
panies that have the largest infrastrucSousou said that OpenStack needs
Its not really one thing; its a whole tures, the deepest pockets, and who
particular focus on becoming more bunch of things. I think its just a matter make commitments to OpenStack.
enterprise-ready. One of the initiatives of time until it gets there. In general, I
Red Hats Balakrishnan sees the
we at Intel started in OpenStack six think things are going in the right direc- future of OpenStack moving in a
months ago is the enterprise initiative tion, but I dont think its done. The core slightly different direction. Eighteen
at OpenStack. It revolves around the savvy enterprises will be able to deploy months ago, OpenStack was viewed as
questions of how do you make Open- it, but for mass deployments in enterthis Play-Doh: How do we shape this to
Stack enterprise readythings like prises, OpenStack still needs work, and fill our needs? he said. Thats where
storage and PaaS come in as excellent
end destinations we can create. Storage, because on the public cloud side,
the top three players make more than
Simply setting up an OpenStack cluster is nowhere near the end game for most enterprises. The real reason to be in the OpenStack pool is to simplify the lives of your devel40% of their revenue on storage,
opers and administrators by giving them both one place to easily provision systems and
compliance, etc. Storage becomes the
enforce policy. For administrators, Dashboard (Horizon) is the project to pay attention
first use case that you dont have to
to. It will eventually be the basic method for running a cloud and managing the instances
spend a lot to justify
Read this story on
inside. Telemetry (Ceilometer) and Orchestration (Heat) are both projects that could end
the business case.
sdtimes.com
up supplementing the Horizon project with new tools and information, as well.
Thats why were very
For developers, Database (Trove) and Elastic Data Processing (Sahara) form the
very excited about
basis of the building blocks for their applications, with Multiple Tenant Cloud MessagCeph being one of the
ing (Zaqar) being the up-and-comer for message queues in OpenStack.
killer apps for OpenAlex Handy
Stack. z
Tools for running OpenStack
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Code Watch
BY LARRY OBRIEN
Can we code conscious programs?

Larry OBrien is a
developer evangelist/
advocate for Xamarin.
Read his blog at
www.knowing.net.
few months ago, I pondered the growing gap

between the way we solve problems in our
day-to-day programming and the way problems are
being solved by new techniques involving Big Data
and statistical machine-learning techniques. The
ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge has seen a leap in performance with the widespread adoption of convolutional neural nets, to the
point where It is clear that humans will soon only
be able to outperform state-of-the-art image classification models by use of significant effort, expertise, and time, according to Andrej Karpathy when
discussing his own results of the test.
Is it reasonable to think or suggest that artificial
neural nets are, in any way, conscious?
Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio
Tononi and expanded by Adam Barrett, suggests
that it is not absurd. According to
this theory, the spark of consciousness is the integration of
information in a system with
feedback loops. (Roughly: The
theory has complexities relating
to systems and subsystems. And
Tononi has recently cast doubt
on the ability of current computer systems to create the necessary maximally irreducible integrated system from which consciousness springs.)
It cannot be overstated how slippery consciousness is and how misleading our intuitive sense of
the world is. We all know that our eyes are constantly darting from one thing to another, have a
blind spot the size of the full moon, and transmit
largely black-and-white data except for the 55
degrees or so in the center of our field of vision.
And yet our vision seems stable, continuous, and
fully imbued with qualities of color and shape.
Some people deny that subjective experience is
a problem at all. Daniel Dennett is the clearest
advocate of this view. His book Consciousness
Explained hammers on the slipperiness of
qualia (the redness of 650 nanometer electromagnetic waves, the warmth of 40 degrees Celsius). Dennetts arguments are extremely compelling, but have never sufficed to convince me
that there is not what David Chalmers labeled the
Hard Problemthe problem of experience.
If IIT is true, our everyday

programming models are
incapable of bootstrapping
consciousness.
Read this story on

sdtimes.com
IIT is, at the very least, a bold attempt at a framework for consciousness that is quantitative and verifiable. A surprising (but welcome) aspect is that it
allows that almost trivially simple machines could
have a minimal consciousness. Such machines would
not have the same qualia as us. Rather, a minimally
conscious machine would experience a qualia of one
bit of information: the difference between is and
not is. I think of this as the experience of ! (a
bang of experience, if you will).
Such an experience is as far removed from human
consciousness as the spark made from banging two
rocks together is from the roiling photosphere of the
sun. Your cerebral cortex has 20 billion or so deeply
interconnected neurons, and on top of the inherent
experiences enabled by that weve layered the profoundly complicating matter of language.
Tononis book Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to
the Soul presents his theory in chapters featuring
metaphorical dialogues between Galileo and various scientists and philosophers. In this way, it
echoes portions of Douglas Hofstadters classic,
Gdel, Escher, Bach, which also has positive
feedback and recursion as essential ingredients of
consciousness and intelligence.
Tononis paper From the Phenomenology to the
Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 is much more substantial. His
Consciousness: Here, There but Not Everywhere
paper is in between. It is in this paper that he explicitly casts doubt on a simulation as likely to have the
necessary real causal power of a neuron to create
a maximally irreducible integrated system, for the
simple reason that the brain is real, but a simulation
of brain is virtual. Its not clear to me why there
would be a difference; a simulated phi seems to
have simply shifted abstraction layers, not the arguments for or against its phenomenal reality.
If IIT is true, consciousness has causal power
(that is, it affects the future calculations of its substrate, whether that be a brain or a machine), and
our everyday programming models are fundamentally incapable of bootstrapping consciousness.
More tentatively, it may be that todays machine
architectures are incapable. If so, the recent leaps
in machine learning and artificial intelligence may
not continue for much longer. Perhaps another AI
Winter is coming. z
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Guest View
BY BEN URETSKY
Ben Uretsky is CEO

and cofounder of
DigitalOcean.
The ideal IaaS gets out of the way

C
ompanies of all sizes have successfully pushed

their way through the clouds and into the digital world in the last several years. Thanks to the
new Web development tools available today, everyone from individual developers to startups can
have as much or as little public-facing Web presence as they need, and can select a Web hosting
provider and launch their Web or mobile application instantly.
The barriers to entry are now so low that the
value of being savvy with where and how you build
your presence is no longer up for debateits a
necessity for any type of organization. Today, there
are more than 2 million mobile applications, and
the majority of organizations in the U.S. own a
domain and host a website.
Whether building an online or mobile application for yourself or for a business, you need to ask yourself
only one question: What are the
core offerings from the hosting
provider that will give me the
most value out of my digital presence?
Its no secret that cloud hosting services arent hurting for company. With
many players vying for the largest market
share, smaller companies are growing quickly
and will live or die by how they differentiate
themselves. Some of these smaller players have
turned away from their bread-and-butter foundation (raw infrastructure) and have instead turned
their focus to other offerings such as managed
services.
While this approach certainly makes sense for
businesses in certain situations, for developers the
most important thing is that their cloud provider
focuses on providing the best infrastructure experience possible. Heres why:
Infrastructure is the common building
block of any online business. All digital businesses begin by writing their code and applications for the market on a personal computer or
laptop. But ultimately, when they are ready to
push it live, they need to set it on a reliable foundation. Infrastructure is the life force of the data
The barriers to entry are so

low that being savvy with
how you build your presence
is no longer up for debate.
Read this story on

sdtimes.com
that every Web or mobile application relies on. It

needs to be strong enough to hold the pieces
together when an application goes to market, and
it needs to have the ability to expand at the same
rate as its use.
Developers staking a claim online dont
need anyone to hold their hands. Developers
are equipped to navigate their path and need little support, as long as the foundation theyre
building on is solid and can grow alongside the
application.
This, combined with the myriad tools now available, make it so developers have the resources they
need to manage the use of infrastructure on their
own. The infrastructure experience should be
designed to be a road map. The more convenient
the map is to follow, the less time is wasted with
distractions along the way and the more time is
spent building something of value.
Instead of investing in contingency plans, cloud
providers working with developers should focus on
providing the most user-friendly, scalable infrastructure possible. Theres no need for call centers
if the path is clear.
Layers of management slow down provisioning times and get in the way. Of course,
cloud-management services need to provide some
level of support. But businesses depend on how
their sites function and how quickly they can scale
up or down in order to adjust for market demand
and traffic waves. What developers really need are
things like quick provisioning times and straightforward pricing.
IaaS will continue to evolve. Weve really
only begun to develop sophisticated infrastructure in the past few years. It will continue
to change and grow and develop, and as it does, the
hope is that it will become both more robust and
more straightforward.
As more players in this space realize the importance of focusing on the developer, cloud-management services would do well to focus their efforts
on creating what developers actually want: a feature-rich cloud that remains simple. When we provide developers with what they want, we dont
need to get in the way. z
www.sdtimes.com
December 2014
SD Times
Analyst View
BY ROB ENDERLE
Smartphones are on the way out

W
e go through technology cycles, and often

things that are incredibly popular evaporate
over time. Eight-track tape players gave way to cassettes, which gave way to iPods, which gave way to
iPhones and iPads. You might recall products like
the Motorola Razr that folks lusted for, but that
entire class of phone is largely gone now.
I think we are beginning to see the end of the
smartphone, and here are the leading causes for taking it to the great technology graveyard in the sky.
Phablets
More tablet than phone, this class is currently led
by the iPhone 6+, which is more like a small iPad
than a smartphone. You hold and use these devices
more like tablets, and while you can hold them to
your head, you both look silly doing so and are in
some danger of knocking yourself out if you answer
a call too quickly.
Phablets primary advantage is that they are
more useful for most productivity and entertainment activities, and it removes the need for a
smartphone, reducing both your hardware cost and
service fees. You only really need one.
Connected Wearable Devices

If you look at either the Google Glass implementation or Samsungs 3G Smartwatch, which is always
connected, neither needs a smartphone to work
and both could be adapted to do smartphone kinds
of things. You can put a pretty big screen on a
smartwatch and, if we carry a tablet, we dont need
a larger screen on a phone as well. The headmounted display of Google Glass can, as technologies improve, effectively give you a 70-inch monitor to work with (being a very high resolution very
close to your eye), and the Smartwatch is far easier
to carry because it leaves both hands free.
Voice command is improving with technologies
like Siri and Cortana, so you shouldnt need physical
keypads or virtual ones for either sending messages
or working with the devices. Further, a Smartwatch
can easily link with a wireless headset, while Google
Glass-like products typically have headsets built in.
You cant keep a good trend down

The Phablet trend is already in place because these
devices look and act like big smartphones, so it is
very easy to wrap our heads around the benefits.

Bigger is generally better for anything that accesses the Web (it will fully render a PC-based Web
page far better), and weve known bigger screens
are better for video ever since we saw our first bigscreen TV.
Wearable Devices will have a harder time gaining traction because they force you to do things
differently. Youll have to dictate messages as
opposed to typing them, put something on your
wrist or head, and even if you are used to a wristwatch, you will likely find that putting the display
inside your wrist rather than outside works better.
That is a lot of change to ask someone to make, and
humans arent that fond of changes, so I think we
are a few years out from seeing anything like a
mainstream replacement of smartphones by wearable devices. I do think, though, that wearables are
likely the end game.
This is because we like convenience, and a wearable device
will always be more convenient
than something we have to pull
out. Look back to how watches
developed and what they evolved
from (replacing pocket watches).
Head-mounted devices, if they can be made less
geeky and more attractive, are more convenient
yet. I imagine in a couple decades we will likely
move to surgically embedded devices that replace
all of this stuff and which are powered off the
bodys electrical field.
Rob Enderle is a
principal analyst at the
Enderle Group.
We like convenience, and a

wearable device will always
be more convenient than
something we pull out.
Saying goodbye to the smartphone

The smartphone clearly has a few more years in it
as the dominant personal technology device. However, we are starting to see the emergence of two
classes of devices: the Phablet and Wearable
Devices. Of the two, the Phablet will likely do the
most initial damage because it is the most natural
extension of the smartphone. But eventually Wearable Devices should prevail as their convenience
gives them the strategic advantage.
All of this is on the path to eventually having
these things surgically implanted, and our kids will
likely look at our magical devices like we look at
typewriters and wonder how the heck anyone ever
was able to work with such obsolete gear. z
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sdtimes.com
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Industry Watch
BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN
Four areas for Big Data innovation

David Rubinstein is
editor-in-chief of SD Times.
he industry has reached an inflection point in

our thinking about data. Its no longer about
slicing and dicing data sets; its now about creating
insights.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with
Steve Mills, whos on the data science team within
the strategic innovation group at Booz Allen
Hamilton, the giant consulting firm. As a company
that covers all domainshealth, financial services,
defense and moreit has a view across all sectors
to see unique trends and challenges that are
emerging, and the company can cast its view
beyond the horizon to see whats coming next.
Mills said there are four
things hes seeing in Big Data:
1. Companies will have to
improve how they manage talent
and grow skills for the analytic
workforce of the future.
2. Companies will have to
cope with changes around the
platforms and technologies upon which theyre
grown reliant.
3. The monetization of analytics. Data was king,
but now, without analytics, its somewhat useless.
4. Visualization becomes a key component as we
move into a world of data analytics.
Data science advances, along with the cloud,
are transformational things for many organizations,
Mills said. This creates a need for a workforce with
a fundamentally new set of skills. Its no longer
just about extracting data, or slicing and dicing it,
or running SQL queries, he said. It really
becomes about creating insights from data. And all
that requires kind of this new way of thinking.
Theres obviously the new technical skills, but also
a new way of thinking about all this.
At the end of the day, Mills said, there are three
ways that organizations can get that talent: outsource for it, hire it, or train existing staff. He said
Booz Allen Hamilton encourages the training route.
Theres a lot of value when a company can have
their own core team. Frankly, theres a benefit for us
as well when were working with knowledgeable
people on the client-side who understand the infrastructure and can help implement it, he explained.
So, what we tell people is build your core team,
and supplement it with consultants and outside
Visualization is critical for

presenting insights gained
from collecting data in a way
executives can comprehend.
Read this story on

sdtimes.com
expertise. That leaves you with hire them or train

them, he continued. I think we can all accept that
hiring is a challenge. Were in the midst of this talent war, and all organizations are challenged to find
staff with these new skills. So really, its about how
do you take your current workforce and people
with the right aptitude and the right foundational
skills and teach them everything you need to
know... We made the decision that we need to create a product that our clients can get access to as
well with the goal being to educate the workforce
of tomorrowours and theirs. There are people
struggling to get these new skills, and we wanted to
provide a tool to help them get there.
As for the monetization of data, Mills said,
People are realizing that without asking questions
of data, without running analytics across it, its in
some ways useless. The value really comes out
when you ask questions of data. Were seeing this
move toward where the output of analytics is actually becoming what has value. And visualization is
really becoming a key component as we move out
into this world of analytics.
The visualization piece is critical for organizations that need to present all the knowledge and
insights gained from collecting all this data in a way
that business executives can easily consume and
comprehend.
We need to make all this output accessible to
the business users via these clean, understandable
visualizations, Mills said. But with all of that
come some challenges. We dont want these things
just to become a business intelligence dashboard.
We want to give them that rich, interactive experience where they can interact with the data and
build their own intuitive understanding of whats
happening. They might not know all the nuts and
bolts of the algorithms, and they dont need to, but
they need to get that comfort factor and intuitive
understanding in whats happening. I think thats
why were seeing this rise of UX and packages like
D3 (an open-source data visualization package)
that can give you that kind of interactive, rich
experience.
As were doing this, if we insulate the end user
too much from all the richness of the analytics, and
boil it down a little bit too much, you can lose some
of the richness that can be there. z
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The Conference for For OEM Builders, Designers,

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Choose from over 50 classes!

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at Wearables TechCon 2015!
Who Should Attend
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Hardware Engineers
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Two Huge Technical Tracks
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Wearables DevCon blew

away all my expectations,
great first year. Words
cant even describe how
insightful and motivating
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Hardware and Design Track
Choose from 30+ classes on product design, electronic engineering for wearable
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Software and App Development Track
Select from 30+ classes on designing software and applications for the hottest
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Exciting Special Events!
Women in Wearables Luncheon

Exhibit Hall Reception
Lightning Talks
Industry Keynotes
Hackathons
SDK Walkthroughs
Mike Diogovanni, Emerging

Technology Lead, Isobar
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Business-Critical Panels
Ethics: Wearables,
Data Collection and Privacy
Visions: The Future of
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The Quantified Self: Fitness Devices
Whats Up Doc? The Wearable Healthcare Revolution

Smartwatch SDK Shootout
www.WearablesTechCon.com March 9-11, 2015 Santa Clara Hyatt Regency Register TODAY!
page 2
Check out this list of classes!

Adding Context to the Web: Bluetooth APIs
and Device Integration
Cary Bran
Lessons Learned from Building Geographically-Enabled Apps for Smartwatches

Antonio Zugaldia
Android Augmented Reality Rubik Cube Solver

Steve Punte
Extending Apps using Android Wear

Nathan Mellor
Android and Devices: Hacking Android Wear

and Google Glass
Dario Laverde
Android Wear vs the Apple Watch

for Developers
Mike DiGiovanni
Apple Watch Tells the Industry
What Time It Is
Ray Potter
Developing Wearable Apps
that Win User Loyalty
John Montgomery
How Chat is Paving the Way

for Wearables Tech
Jenny Tong
How Does Privacy Exist in the Era of the

Internet of Things?
Adam D.H. Grant
Killer Apps Are Key to Consumer Smart

Glasses Adoption
Anna
Jenn
If you are
serious about
Wearables
development
and design,
YOU SHOULD
ATTEND
this conference!
Building a Thought-Controlled Drone

Jim McKeeth
Beyond the Screen: The Future of Interaction
Development in a Wearable World
Erica Stanley
Building a POV Live-Streaming Platform for
Wearable HUDs
Victor Kaiser-Pendergrast and Jake Steinerman
Building Fitness Apps Beyond Peer Competition

Beatriz Datangel
Connecting Wearable Devices to the
Physical Web
Jeremy Lucas
Emotionally-Intelligent Wearables Using

Artificially Intelligent Vision Sensing
Modar (JR) Alaoui
Expanding Glass: Integrating Google Glass

with Android Wear
Victor Kaiser-Pendergrast and Jake Steinerman
Wearable Interface Design: Open Sesame
Mark Stephen Meadows
Internet of Nodebots
Jenny Tong
Hello, WatchKit
Natasha Murashev
Making a Wearable:
Why Does it Really Take So Long?
Mike Kasparian
Making Wearables Really Workable

How Cool Apps Are Changing the Wearables
Landscape
Matthew Goldman
Sensor Hubs: Enabling High-Performance,
Low-Power Wearable Devices
Chuck Gritton
Smart Practices for Guarding Your Wearable

Technology Worldwide
Kenneth D. Suzan
Technology Commercialization 101: Is Your
Tech Idea a Viable Business? Parts I and II
Evangeline Marzec
The Software Developers Guide to Prototyping

Wearable Devices
Lance Gleason
Wearable and Bluetooth Exploring the
Details of Wireless Communications
Vincent Gao
Wireless Charging in Wearable Devices
Jonathan Palley
Your Brain: The New Wearable Interface

Jim McKeeth
www.WearablesTechCon.com March 9-11, 2015 Santa Clara Hyatt Regency Register TODAY!
page 3
Registration Information
Conference Pricing
Three-Day Conference
March 9,10,11
Exhibit Hall Only

March 10 and 11
Register by
Dec. 12
Full Price
$895
$1,395
$35
$75
SAVE $500
Venue and Location

Wearables TechCon will be held at the
Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, CA.
In the
Heart of
Silicon
Valley
Three-Day Conference Registration Includes:
Admission to sessions and classes on March 9, 10, and 11

Admission to keynotes
Admission to Exhibit Hall
Admission to all special events, including the Networking Reception
Coffee breaks and lunch where indicated
Exhibit Hall Only Registration Includes:
Admission to Exhibit Hall on March 10 and 11

Admission to Networking Reception on March 10
Admission to Keynote sessions
CLICK HERE
for information about HOW TO REGISTER
Special Wearables TechCon Discounted Rates:
Take advantage of special discounted room rates at the Hyatt

Regencyonly US$199 per night for single/double occupancy
Rooms for the reduced rate are limited!
Click here to make your hotel reservation or use the Make Hotel
Reservation link on the confirmation page of your registration.
Reservations at the reduced rate can be made through 5:00 PM
Eastern time on February 27, 2015assuming they dont sell
out. Dont wait until the last minute to reserve your hotel rooms!
Special Discounts
You may combine one of these special discounts with the Early Registration pricing to save even more!
Group. Group discounts will be given automatically if you register three

or more people at once. You can also contact Camille Barron at
cbarron@bzmedia.com to receive the $100/person discount if your
group is unable to register at the same time. Contact her also for special
discounts for groups of 10 or more.
Government Employees. Government, Federal, State and Local Government

employees can receive an additional $100 off the Three-Day Conference
price. Enter code GOV in discount code field. SAM registered indicates that
we are listed in the primary supplier database for the Federal Government.
Educational Institutions. Personnel employed by or attending educational

institutions can get a $100 discount off the Three-Day Conference price
by using the code EDU.
User Groups. Contact Stacy Burris at sburris@bzmedia.com to see if your

group is eligible for a discount.
Non-Profit Organizations. Personnel employed by non-profit organizations

can get a $100 discount off the Three-Day Conference price by using the
code NONPROFIT.
Register Online TODAY at www.WearablesTechCon.com!

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SDT308 coverTIP_Layout 1 11/18/14 2:55 PM Page 1

DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE NO. 308 $9.95 www.sdtimes.com

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DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE NO. 308 $9.95 www.sdtimes.com

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ISSUE 308 DECEMBER 2014

FROM THE EDITORS

SD Times on the Web

Microsoft gets enterprises, not consumers

Bringing unique talents into the workplace

Microsoft offers major tool upgrade for

Reaction to open-source .NET is swift, positive

EFF: APIs cant be copyrighted

AtScript: Googles new superset JavaScript runtime

jQuery 3.0 and the future of Web development

A push for Web-based Java IDE

Developers losing interest in Google Glass

QSM adds agile to its Software Almanac

Syncfusion supports predictive models in

Delivery speed hinges on testing

Scaling enterprise agile

CODE WATCH by Larry OBrien

GUEST VIEW by Ben Uretsky

ANALYST VIEW by Rob Enderle

INDUSTRY WATCH by David Rubinstein

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APIs (including 64-bit) for NET, Java,

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF David Rubinstein

lightning fast Redmond Magazine

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Meteor 1.0 crash lands

Its official: HTML5 is a standard

Steve Ballmer is finally becoming a man!

Microsoft is the new

The Top 5 GitHub

1) Material Design Icons

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FROM THE EDITORS

Microsoft gets enterprises, not consumers

revamped operating system to try find