The ancient Greeks had no computers, but their mythology includes one figure who embodies an unchanging reality of programming. I am speaking, of course, of Tantalus. You may remember the story.

Tantalus was a king of Phrygia, in what we now call Turkey. He was a friend of the Greek gods until he offended them. Then he received a distinctive punishment. In the underworld, Tantalus was tied to a fruit tree that stood in a river. When he reached for a fruit, the branches would rise until the intended meal was just beyond his grasp. When he leaned down to get a drink, the water receded. Tantalus was sentenced to eternal hunger and thirst, and the objects of his longing were forever just out of reach.

So it is with programmers. But instead of fruit and water, we hunger for reusability.

You don't have to write code very long to realize that almost all of what we do has been done before. We are constantly solving problems that have been solved over and over again in the past. We write boilerplate code and reinstantiate well-known algorithms.

We would be more productive – and our days more enjoyable – if we weren't always reinventing the wheel. What if we could bundle code for reuse? Then we could incorporate algorithms and boilerplate code by reference instead of tediously rewriting it with each new app.

This dream has been the motivation behind many of the technologies that support our industry. Off the top of my head, the list includes these:

• Unix command-line utilities

• system libraries

• function libraries

• class libraries

• dynamic link libraries

• subroutines

• object-oriented programming

• package-oriented languages like Ada and Modula-2

• code generators and CASE tools

• component-based development

• visual programming

• use cases and design patterns

• application frameworks

• service-oriented architectures

It's a rare project that doesn't make use of several of these technologies. But the software we write can still be characterized as ad hoc. We continue to reinvent the wheel with each new project.

I don't have a solution to offer – the technologies on the list, plus, no doubt, others that escaped my attention – should be sufficient. The benefits of reuse are obvious. Yet software reuse remains maddeningly – tantalizingly – out of reach.

Web recommendation: Imitation is a form of reuse, I guess. And they say (do they still say?) it is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, the good folks at Apple must feel awfully flattered these days, due to this effect. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is grateful for the days Internet service, water delivery, and electricity are all uninterrupted.

Forrester recently released a report entitled "Building Mobile Apps? Start With Web; Move to Hybrid," to help developers answer the question of where to start with mobile development. 

We've written about this topic a lot in the last year -- we've discussed compiler tools that wrap native code in HTML5, like SenchaTouch, and we've also discussed building applications for the individual platforms to give designers and developers more control over what they are creating. 

At the end of the day it really comes down what you're willing, and able, to support as a development team. 

Can you maintain multiple applications? Or is it more feasible for you to create one "mobile" version and then build out from there? 

What do you think will be the trend for mobile development in 2012? Share your ideas, and best practices, with us. 

Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke, Inc. an independent technology analyst firm, said to only talk about breaking down the silos between the development and operations teams would be myopic; the conversation, she added, needs to include the architects, the QA team and business analysts.

“Dev Ops is a faddish term. We’ve spoken for the past 10 years about breaking down the silos,” Lanowitz said, adding that software developers need to look at transforming the whole lifecycle and evaluate the entire supply chain in order to continue evolving the application lifecycle management process. 

Conversations and connectivity between teams, with a focus on their individual skills is an important part of the process, she said.

Developers will not become operations professionals and operations will not become developers, Lanowitz said, they will still each have their own specialized skills, but they should be able to connect with one another about software development projects. It is part of the idea in ALM that traditional IT is merging with embedded systems, something we’ll be featuring in our story about Voke’s recent ALM survey.

Are you breaking the silos? Are you a business analyst or software architect working with developers? Email vreitano@bzmedia.com; we’d love to hear your side of the story.

In a report released earlier this week by Veracode, I thought a few of the findings were worth mentioning. The study, State of Software Security, is the largest analysis of code-level security to date using static, dynamic and manual testing methodologies.

Upon first submission of the 1,600 internally developed, open source, outsourced and commercial applications, 58% were found to have vulnerabilities similar to those in the Google and Department of Defense cyber attacks. And the pervasiveness of easily remedied vulnerabilities indicated a lack in secure coding. Cross-site scripting (XSS) prevalence topped the vulnerability category by 33%, despite widely available libraries intended to eliminate the risk via output encoding. Information leakage followed with 22% prevalence.  

Other key findings included dispelling the myth that open-source software is less secure than other software. Veracode, a cloud-based application risk management company, actually found that open source has comparable security, faster remediation times and fewer potential backdoors than commercial or outsourced applications. 

Veracode also found that software-related industries recorded the lowest security scores on first submission, while financial-related industries and government sectors faired much better. Their applications were deemed (thankfully) acceptable on first submission, placing them at the top of the study’s data set. 

The report is representative of 15 industries and the applications studied ranged from components, shared libraries, web and non-web. Programming languages scrutinized included .NET, C/C++ and Java. The full report can be seen by visiting http://www.veracode.com/reports/index.html.  

As I am sure most of you already know, Gartner Inc. is probably the largest and most trusted (or at least widely used) technology analysis firm out there. Gartner analyzes a lot more than just technology, but in our industry, they seem to have a death grip on the title of top analyst firm.

I've spoken to many analysts there, and I've attended some of their conferences, and I have to say that the company deserves its reputation as a source of quality and truth. But there is one aspect of the Gartner world that has long irritated me: The Magic Quadrant.

Now, the primary reason I dislike this Magic Quadrant is that most of the companies who make it in there immediately seize on this fact in their PR work. I've gotten countless calls that suggest I should cover a company simply because it is in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. I'd just like to state for the record here and now: We will never cover any company based solely on its appearance in a Magic Quadrant.

ZL Technologies is also upset about the Magic Quadrant. So much so that they've decided to take legal action against Gartner. The ZL claim is that Gartner only places its clients in the Magic Quadrant. Could be. I know that I've seen some suspicious looking quadrants in my day. And as a publicity stunt, this is doing a lot of favors for ZL, a company I'd never heard of before the lawsuit.

But I do think they have a valid point here. Gartner sells a lot of reports and services to a lot of companies, and it also includes many of those companies in its research. If IBM is going to pay Gartner millions of dollars for a report on the future of Z/OS in the market, is it possible that the contract is balanced upon a Magic Quadrant inclusion?

These types of lawsuits aren't black and white. I'm sure there is a lot of gray here, and Gartner probably walks the line with many policies in place to act as a firewall.

The actual report charts certainly support ZL's claim that Gartner favors massive companies in its Magic Quadrant. IBM effectively lives there in almost every category, and it's rare that a non-public company makes it in there. It does happen, though.

But on the other side of the fence, when it comes to gigantic projects, like world wide coordinated enterprise software development, it is the gigantic companies that are best suited to execute, when speaking generically. I think that ZL Technologies, and many Gartner report purchasers, miss the fact that many of the firms in these charts are well suited to very specific needs. Gartner reports focus on the very broad, unless you pay them lots of money for a custom report. In very broad terms, of course IBM is going to be your best bet: No matter what weird edge case you have, IBM has probably dealt with it somewhere.

But that doesn't mean a smaller firm can't be just as effective at executing on a project. Gartner's simply showing off the generalists. The United States usually wins the most gold medals at the Olympics, but that doesn't mean it will always win the Biathlon.

Finally, Gartner does employ some supremely smart people, and it's $10,000-a-day consultants are worth every penny. But at the end of the day, no consultant can replace your own time-consuming, painstaking hard work and research. Gartner and any other consulting firm are not remedies; they are a tools to be applied where most effective. They are also sources of information. But you wouldn't let your hammer and radio choose what kind of engine you put in your car, would you?

ZL Technologies is putting out a call for like-minded Gartner haters.