In the cloud, code doesn‘t need developers?

Platforms from companies such as OutSystems and Mendix have emerged in this development niche, and with them comes growing interest in codeless tools, says analyst David Norton of Gartner. "We're seeing SMBs who are trying to lower costs" by looking at high-productivity, model-driven environments, he says.

Also driving interest is frustration with IT and business units that want to handle their own development. An official at Software AG, which is a player in the codeless development market, concurs. "Businesses do not want to be dependent on IT to get everything done," says Pankaj Malviya, senior vice president and general manager of application PaaS at the company.

"I see a lot of interest and a fair amount of adoption," of codeless environments, says analyst John Rymer, of Forrester. He cites software vendors participating in the market ranging from Mendix to Salesforce.com and Microsoft with its SharePoint collaboration platform.

Mendix, OutSystems, and Software AG vie in codeless dev

Mendix bills its cloud-based platform as the app platform for the enterprise, or PaaS for the business user. "We help our customers dramatically cut down the time it takes to build new apps," says CEO Derek Roos.

"Instead of writing code, you basically model your app," he says. "It's a drag-and-drop-like interface." Application services are provided for building metadata-driven applications. Programs built in Mendix can be extended with Java or JavaScript.

OutSystems offers a visual, RAD (rapid application delivery) approach to development. With the OutSystems Platform, Java and .Net applications are generated. "This [system] has been built to build any style of complex apps," says David Holmes, vice president of marketing at OutSystems. Enterprise Web and mobile applications can be built, and reusable modules and components are featured.

Software AG moved into the codeless development space when it acquired cloud platform vendor LongJump this spring. The service has been rebranded AgileAppsLive. Visually developed, process-driven applications can be created without writing code, such as an employee onboarding system, Malviya says. These can be deployed in private or public clouds, on-premise or to mobile devices.

LongJump client Economic Modeling Specialists, which provides Web-based tools for looking at labor market data, has used the platform to fashion record-keeping applications. The company is moving over to AgileAppsLive. A junior developer has been designated to work with the platform, says David Wallace, project manager at Economic Modeling Specialists.

"We basically explain to him, 'Here's what we want to do, here's the kind of report we need,'" Wallace says. The developer then figures out database fields and can build workflows and automated triggers. "It has a workflow built into it."

 

LongJump enables building of forms-based business applications, Wallace says. "[It] has saved us a ton of money, a ton of time," he says. "It's just a flexible, prebuilt structure that really lets us fly."

Codeless approaches can be limiting

Still, these tools have their limitations -- particularly when it comes to integration. Integrating with mainframes via codeless platforms can be an issue, Norton notes, and a skill set has to be acquired. "The limitation of any high-productivity environment or model-driven environment is it needs a different set of skills [than] traditional language-based development like Java or .Net," Norton says. Application builders need to deal with abstraction and models.

While acknowledging that "codeless" development expands software building beyond just developers, Rymer sees the risk of vendor lock-in. "These are completely proprietary environments, most of which are provided by small vendors." He also rejects the term "codeless," saying, "These environments allow delivery of simple applications without writing code. But in the real world, there's usually some [code] somewhere in the project." He cited integration as a place where custom code is needed.

Java and .Net developers will not be losing their jobs over the codeless environments, Norton says, and there will always be a need for developers who could build something such as a complex billing system faster in Java than it could be done in Unified Modeling Language In some corporations, abstract- and model-based approaches to development do not fit in with the culture, according to Norton.

But productivity can be much greater with the codeless tools. Users can become productive in a matter of days, Norton says: "Once you get people trained up, their productivity can be eight to 12 times higher" than with standard development using Java or .Net.

Facebook Puts the Brakes on ‘The Hacker Way’

Before taking his company public last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned Wall Street that his social network would follow “The Hacker Way,” an unconventional path built in part around the adage “move fast and break things.”

The idea was that Facebook would rather make mistakes than get left behind in fast-innovating Silicon Valley. But a year and a half after the “Hacker Way” manifesto, Facebook is breaking fewer things and moving more slowly — at least when it comes to individual features and products. It’s testing new tools more thoroughly prior to release and then parsing goodies out slowly to help smoke out even more problems.

Facebook’s move toward greater testing is a sign of maturation at the company, overseen by the 29-year-old Zuckerberg, and this should help Facebook as it seeks to build an ever more intimate relationship with its users, collecting data on their physical movements and offline shopping habits, trying to capture more of their web searches, and targeting them based on other websites they’ve visited.

In some regards, Facebook is moving faster than it ever has before. Since going public, it has launched a search engine, a mobile “apperating system,” a camera app, a pages app, a “poke” app, an app store, an ad exchange, an online store, a gift card, a video sharing system, at least two major news feed updates, and plenty more. The teenaged Zuckerberg, in full hacker glory as a Harvard underclassman, would have approved of the breakneck product release pace.

But while Facebook has more projects going in parallel, it has learned to take its time releasing each one. Take the News Feed revision released by the company earlier this week, which can resurface old but relevant content you’ve loaded but not looked at and which weighs content according to who you’ve interacted with most recently on Facebook. The changes were tested first on Facebook employees, who over the course of two weeks registered only a single complaint, and then on roughly 1 percent of the 700 million Facebook users who visit their news feeds every day.

All significant tweaks to News Feed get some sort of testing on a subset of Facebook users, usually for a week or two, according to engineering manager Lars Backstrom. This week, Facebook created a new blog to announce major changes to News Feed, part of an attempt to solicit still more feedback.

Even more extensive testing accompanied the release of Facebook’s Graph Search, which spent more than two years as an internal project, being refined, tested on employees, and even tested on users behind one-way glass. After it was announced publicly in January, Graph Search was made available to “a very small number of users,” as Zuckerberg put it.

Only this week did all English speaking U.S. users gain access. In the intervening months, Facebook engineers tweaked the system to account for unanticipated challenges, like people typing “pics of besties” rather than the more understandable “photos of my friends,” or typing “movies I dig” instead of “movies I like.”

At Graph Search’s launch, Zuckerberg even went so far as to brag about how slowly Graph Search would be deployed. “We’re going to start rolling it out very slowly,” he said, “and we’re going to incorporate data from how people use it and we’re going to make the product better before we roll it out very widely.”

Facebook’s love for pre-release testing has even grown to include advertising products. Facebook Exchange, a potentially creepy (if well precedented) product that shows users ads based on what outside websites they’ve recently visited, was in beta for three months prior to broader launch in September.

This sort of care should be a welcome change for Facebook users burned by the social network’s old familiar cycle of making big sweeping changes, whether to privacy standards or the Facebook interface or both, angering users, apologizing to those users, and partially reversing the original changes. It’s been a couple of years since Facebook went through one of those.

Not that Wall Street has fully appreciated Facebook’s caution. Analysts have been quick to note that while Facebook announced it was doubling its costs this year amid a hiring binge, it simultaneously warned that the payoff from new products like Graph Search and Facebook Home will come only in the years to come. As a result, Facebook spent more than a year trying simply to return its stock to the levels of its initial public offering. But investors may yet find that user trust pays very nice dividends over the long haul.

Apple seeks ban on Samsung phones in the US

Apple is trying to force Samsung Electronics's mobile devices off US store shelves a week after dodging an iPhone 4 ban by a rare White House veto.

The company will ask a US appeals court to block sales of Samsung models a California jury found violated patents for the iPhone's look and features . Later, a US trade agency is expected to say if it will halt some Samsung imports based on other Apple patent infringement claims.

For Cupertino, California-based Apple, making Samsung change or stop selling some smartphones and tablet computers is more important than money. The $1 billion verdict it won at trial last year equals less than two weeks' worth of iPhone sales and one-seventh of Samsung's second-quarter profit.

"Sometimes, the money's not enough," said Ray Van Dyke, a technology-patent lawyer with the Van Dyke Firm in Washington. "Between Apple and Samsung, it's about who's going to be the top dog. You want to shut them down. This is the club. You can beat them into submission with a club and maintain your top dog status."

Apple and Samsung together make almost half of all smartphones sold, with Samsung holding the title of world's biggest and the two companies vying to be No. 1 in the US.

The two companies are spending millions of dollars in legal fees battling across four continents.

Why government websites are vulnerable to attacks

Many servers that host government websites are plagued by various problems like obsolete software and poor secure coding, making them vulnerable to cyberattacks, a study has said. 

According to official data, a total of 78 government websites were hacked and 16,035 incidents related to spam, malware infection and system break-in were reported this year so far. 

It is very important for the nation to start upgrading its IT infrastructure and keep up with the latest security guidelines & practices, the study said. 

"One can find servers running older and vulnerable versions of software, poor server management, web applications deployed on these servers being designed and implemented by programmers who lack awareness of secure coding practices," the study by Information Security Consortium (Infosac) said. 

However, private sector is much more cautious and alert when it comes to their IT infrastructure compared to the government, it said. 

The study also highlighted sophisticated cyber attacks, possibly from neighbouring China, aimed at stealing critical information from government organisation and large corporate houses. 

Giving details of a malware Travnet that hit computer networks in India recently, it said that the group behind the attack had done extensive research on topics that are current as well as intriguing to Indian targets. 

Some of phishing mails sent to individuals have attachments such as 'BJP won't dump Modi for Nitish NDA headed for split.doc'. 

"The analysis strongly suggests that the group behind Travnet might be from China," the study said. 

Rajshekhar Murthy, Director, CERT-ISAC, National Security Database, said, "the report outlines the dangers Indian IT infrastructure is facing and references research which proves that our government and Critical Infrastructure are targets of sophisticated attacks". 

CERT-ISAC is a mobile and electronic security body and part of InfoSec consortium that is made up of cyber security communities like nullcon, c0c0n, Malcon and ClubHack. 

Infosac is supported by National Security Database (NSD), a government supported empanelment program for information security experts for national critical infrastructure protection. 

Infosac is also organising four-day Ground Zero summit here from November 7 for promoting information security and awareness in the region.

US cloud industry set to lose up to $35bn because of PRISM

According to a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the repercussions of PRISM means that, over the next three years, the US cloud computing industry can lose from $22bn to $35bn due to reneged market share.

Anyone hoping this is a brand new piece of research may be slightly disappointed, although they’re not entirely wrong either.

Last month, CloudTech reported on a survey from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) which revealed how, for one in 10 companies, they had gone so far as to cancel business with a US CSP because of the PRISM allegations.

And the ITIF report admits partially guesstimating these figures from the CSA research. “We might reasonably conclude,” the report author, Daniel Castro writes, “that given current conditions, US cloud service providers stand to lose somewhere between 10 and 20% of the foreign market in the next few years.”

Gmail? More like Gspam, blasts Microsoft in new ‘Scroogled‘ attack

Google is spamming Gmail users with 'ads that look like like real emails,' Microsoft has pointed out in a new attack on its rival web giant.

In the latest barb aimed in Google's direction on the Scroogled.com website, Microsoft accused Google of using a crafty Gmail redesign, which touted a reduction in inbox clutter, to spam users.

Microsoft says Google has gone beyond reading emails to target users with ads and is now using the information to send ads directly to their accounts, marked as unread emails.

The post explains how the spam from third-party advertisers appears in the Promotions tab within the Gmail web client and are addressed from the 'no-reply@google.com' email account.

'Pushing junk mail to inbox'

"Google violates your privacy by reading every single word of every single email sent to and from Gmail accounts so they can better target you with ads," the post read. "Now, they're going one step further over the line by using that same personal information to spam your inbox with ads that look like real emails.

"Your email provider should protect you from spam, but Google is doing just the opposite; they're reading your private email conversations and using what they find to push junk mail directly to your Gmail inbox."

The ads are only lightly identifiable by a small icon and a slightly different colour shade. As with real emails, these ads can be stared and added to the Primary inbox, Microsoft explains.

"They watch everything you do any use it to make a profit off of you," an accompanying video clip claimed.

The point to all this, of course, is to point how how different Microsoft's own Outlook.com service is. The company is attempting to win over Gmail users by pledging never to scan the content of inboxes for the purposes of targeting users with ads.

• If you'd rather not take Microsoft's word for it, here are 10 ways we think Outlook.com beats Gmail.

How big data platforms should work

Jason Hoffman, CTO and founder of cloud service provider Joyent, details how combining object storage and parallel compute clusters can make working with big data easier and faster by eliminating bottlenecks.

How objects and compute will eat the world
Networked storage vendors' days are numbered. Customers are fleeing to consolidated online object storage, and soon the digital object storage will surpass traditional file storage as the primary model for data outside of a DBMS. But there's a subtle and often unappreciated downside to most distributed object storage: data inertia. The implicit limits on moving huge data sets to in-network compute nodes deter business or clinical insights from surfacing.

At Joyent, we architected the Manta Storage and Compute Service -- "Manta," for short -- to be a best-in-class object store and an in-storage massively parallel compute cluster. It drives data latency effectively to zero, moving weekly or monthly jobs to an hourly or even an on-demand analytic cadence.

Whence big data?
Massive data volumes arise from machines (log files, API calls), digitized nature (DNA sequences, video, audio, environmental sensors), and the humanity of billions of people online (Facebook, Baidu, e-commerce). Take a mere 10 million patients' genomes, for example. That requires 20 exabytes (EB) of storage. Then there's camera phone resolution and market penetration, which has been growing exponentially. And according to Digital Marketing Ramblings, Twitter distributes 400 million updates per day to 500 million subscribers.

But in 2012, all enterprise storage vendors shipped just 16EB of capacity.

With the big data wherewithal to capture it all, we could be at the early stages of a deeply disruptive wave of innovation. This sweeping crush threatens business models and technical architectures that assumed a paucity of data and scarcity of places to put it.

The additional hidden cost to networked object storage is the implicit inertia in petabytes of recorded audio or e-commerce server logs. Namely, there is a need to move that data from its resting place to a computational node. Computation is necessary to glean the business insights, social relevancy, and clinical results that make saving digital ephemera worthwhile. That theoretical 1Gbps or even 40Gbps network is a severe limit to the class of algorithms that can be considered and the rate at which they can be applied.

What is object storage?
Objects differ from files in one key respect: They are immutable once written. They can be updated and overwritten in their entirety, but the in-place update of a POSIX or similar file system is verboten. In practice this is not a severe constraint, especially given that most object data itself is immutable. DNA rarely mutates, log tampering is bad, cat videos are remixed and republished. Besides, mutable data winds up in a richly indexed DBMS, which itself may reside on an object or file store.

 Enforcing immutability yields architectural simplicity. A massively distributed storage system across networked nodes must contend with network congestion and component failures. A technically seductive approach is to distribute a single object's data across nodes, with erasure-coded partial redundancy to survive one or more node failures at reasonable economic investment. The limits of physics and metaphysics are captured in Brewer's CAP theorem and elsewhere like in Abadi's PACELC refinement.

These acronyms themselves express the trade-offs inherent in a distributed architecture. "CAP" stands for "consistency or availability under network partition"? "PACELC" is "partition, availability, or consistency, else latency or consistency"? Without going into the math, data writes orchestrated at the grain of an entire object are synchronous (consistency first) or asynchronous (availability first).

Unwittingly, these popular redundant-array-of-independent-nodes (RAIN) architectures force an expensive reconstitution operation across the network for each object read. Furthermore, no meaningful computation can be performed at a storage node because each node has only a fractional view, tesselated arbitrarily by the erasure code chosen. By design, this popular object storage architecture requires non-negotiable network bandwidth to operate on an object.

Joyent Manta Storage and Compute Architecture
The Joyent Manta Storage Service's architecture is a departure from storage-only approaches. Instead, a high-performance compute cluster is included in each storage node. We aimed for a converged storage-and-compute design goal.

Rather than erasure-coding across nodes, Manta uses erasure codes across disks (currently 9+2 across three stripes with three hot standby disks, if you must know). It also uses a default multiple-data-center full-copy redundancy to achieve equal data durability to RAIN systems. The economic overhang for a default two copies is surprisingly negligible compared to common RAIN architectures for standard redundancy services. This suggests a two-fold redundancy or a rich gross margin associated with these services.

Regardless, the architectural limitations exist when distributing objects across nodes. Instead of beginning with a full object copy, a Manta storage node already has the entire object over a very high-bandwidth PCIe 3.0 bus and a theoretical 256Gbps, and it can perform meaningful computation on that object with minimal data movement latency.

What types of meaningful computation, you ask? The biggest use cases we'ave seen are delightfully poetic one-liners operating on large data sets. They may extract user or other cohort data from logs for aggregate, operational, billing, sentiment, intention, or geographic insights. Another use case leverages the Internet-visible nature of Manta: bulk in-place media transcoding. These include more prosaic needs like e-commerce catalog thumbnail creation or video format changes. We're beginning to see higher-level machine learning and classification computations that exploit Manta's map/reduce framework even further.

 Common, familiar tools

What really evokes ecstatic comments from Manta customers is its use of standard, familiar tools. It's big data without the steep learning curve. Developers familiar with a machine vision library like OpenCV or text-processing languages like Perl are free to use them at the parallel compute nodes in Manta without modification. This reduces training and retooling time, and it taps a relatively large pool of developers in addition to self-styled data scientists.

With the launch of Manta, it's only becoming clearer that object storage is eating the world of storage. There's no doubt that computation on big data is driving new business models. Our view is that simplified, high-performance compute on stored objects will unleash another wave of innovation and business advantage. Object storage that can also provide analytic insights -- what a concept. Now it's our new reality.