There was a time in recent memory when the software developer community got its marching orders from the likes of Sun, Microsoft, and a select few others. Then everything went wonky – yes, ‘wonky’ is a technical term, look it up on the Urban Dictionary. You see Oracle bought Sun, Microsoft lost Bill and made Steve go crazy, and Apple’s Steve told Google’s Eric to go to heck. These changes spilled over into the software we developers use to build iPhone, Android, and Ajax apps, with poor results.
These software tools and code are usually released with an open source software license. While the licenses may vary a bit they all say the same thing… if you improve or change the code you need to make the changes available to the community. When a community branches out into two communities developers using the tools usually need to make a choice on which branch they will use.
Hudson used to be the leading platform for continuous integration (build) of Java apps. Now everyone but Oracle/Sun uses Jenkins.
It looks like 2015 will see some very big branches:
- Google’s Angular platform – for developers to build advanced mobile and Web apps – announced the Angular 2.0 platform. There’s no compatibility to Angular 1.0 and many of the core concepts change. Ever since the announcement Google has been trying to keep the Angular 1.0 community from self destructing.
- The pace of new feature development and bug fixes in the Node.js project has many in its user community upset. Joyent – the new parent company for Node.js – has been slow to release new code in contrast to the earlier efforts. It’s kind of not fair to Joyent considering Node.js’ popularity – 20 million downloads in the first 6 months. The result is the IO.js fork of Node.js from the Node Forward movement. Node and IO may join forces again in the future, but who knows!
What have you been noticing in the software world? Write your comment below.
-Frank Cohen
VOTSH Founder
