Short Takes: July 15, 2009

By SD Times Editorial Board

July 15, 2009 —

Figuring out compliance
I spent a lot of time writing about compliance in this issue. Compliance is an important part of the requirements phase for software development, and cloud computing is going to change how companies deal with it.

In my research, I learned that some regulations were better (or worse) than others. Strict regulation in the U.K. and France makes it much more difficult to use cloud computing for line-of-business applications. In the U.S., some government regulations like HIPAA establish a liability framework, but the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standard doesn't. PCI is more flexible than HIPAA, but there is a certain lack of accountability.

However, my friend Jeremiah Grossman, WhiteHat Security founder and CTO, has said that PCI is superficial, and the people that are supposed to be watched are the watchdogs. There's too much disparity. More work should be done to standardize and coordinate regulations across borders, because today's systems cut across continents. — David Worthington

Will Mykonos spread its wings?
AJAX company Mykonos seems to enjoy symbolism.

Company execs chose to name the startup after the Greek island, because it represented a sunny, paradise-like alternative to snow-riddled Rochester, N.Y., where the company has its headquarters. In addition to that, Mykonos chose an image of a butterfly as the company logo, with the concept of the butterfly effect in mind.

Mykonos believes that one developer can flap his or her wings and benefit someone working at the other end of the world. "That really was what our goal was in Mykonos, to allow individual developers to have a bigger impact, much like the idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another," said CEO David Koretz.

We'll see if Mykonos has a big impact on AJAX development, or if it remains a caterpillar in the technology tree. — Jeff Feinman

Keep an eye on Parrot
The Parrot project is, perhaps, best known as the basis of the Perl 6 runtime, Rakudo. But after talking with the developers on Parrot, I'm convinced that they're working on one of the coolest projects in dynamic languages out there.

Though Parrot has been mired in development for more than nine years now, it is still moving forward and seems to be fulfilling the project's goal of building a dynamic language runtime that can support all dynamic languages. It would seem, however, that those goals are so lofty and complicated, that the project has needed every day of those nine years to get it right.

Of course, the real excitement of Parrot isn't its maturity, it's the promise of having access to any dynamic language's libraries through any other dynamic language. That means accessing Python routines from a Perl program. Truly, this is a project to watch. — Alex Handy

Clouds must be open
Take open-source sensibilities into the enterprise? That was a radical idea 10 years ago, when Brian Behlendorf and Bill Portelli started CollabNet.

It was the time of ALM 1.0, with LAN-based tools and processes that hard-coded organizations in to their vendors. CollabNet’s vision was for transparent, open-source development, with a recognition that distributed development was a desirable business model. Now, fast-forward 10 years, and companies get that.

Today, Portelli recognizes that a computing cloud also can’t be an island, like LANs were back in the day. He said organizations, though, still prefer to have their data behind a firewall, along with their operations and processes. “Companies are now asking, ‘What are my development teams putting on the ‘Net? What are Amazon’s security policies?’ ” Portelli said.

“Amazon doesn’t guarantee uptime for the application, only for their infrastructure. But companies don’t run infrastructures. They run applications and need accountability for keeping their applications up.”

This, he said, will usher in a new era of application life-cycle management, starting with development—for the cloud and within the cloud. — David Rubinstein

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, security

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33609

RSA keynote: Lack of security in the cloud breeds distrust Experts say that until cloud security standards mature and are adopted more widely, adoption will be tepid

Gartner: The cloud and security are biggest trends for 2010 A Gartner survey outlined the 10 most strategic technologies that will be used next year

Layer 7 takes security to the cloud The security software provider has made its technology available for cloud deployment so that organizations can move security policies to and from the cloud.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?

Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST