If you haven’t noticed, software development faces some severe challenges right now. Serious problems face us – not in some hypothetical time-frame, but right now. And I am sorry to say that the tool vendors and thought leaders we count on are letting us down. They’re focusing on other matters entirely.

I don’t mean to pick on Java, but that’s the example that comes to mind. A year from now Java will support lambda expressions. The big brains directing the evolution of what is arguably the industry’s most important language surveyed the computing terrain and decided the best thing they could do for developers was add syntax for lambda expressions.

Are you freaking kidding me?

To be fair, the Java team is also grafting modularity-control features onto Java via the Jigsaw project, and these features could be of real benefit to Java programmers. But still…lambda expressions?

Here are the things we developers ought to be focusing on.

Security

Yes, I know. I’m a broken record on this issue. But we don’t face a bigger challenge, and the days of shrugging off security as an operations concern are over. If you have a wireless router in your company, a bad guy in your parking lot can have access to your network in two or three hours using off-the-shelf tools and a $350 laptop.

You think your firewalls and strong passwords are sufficient protection? You’re dreaming. The U.S. military spends billions defending its servers, and last week it told the Senate Armed Services Committee that these security measures have failed. The military now assumes that hostile forces have network access, and it is shifting its focus from controlling access to protecting data. “[W]e have to go to a model where we assume that the adversary is in our networks,” said Dr. James Peery, director of the Information Systems Analysis Center at Sandia National Laboratories. “It’s on our machines, and we’ve got to operate anyway.” Anonymous has demonstrated it can compromise pretty much anyone it targets. If your network hasn’t been compromised yet, it’s because the bad guys haven’t selected you as a target yet. When they do, your security measures will fail.

This isn’t just an operations problem. It’s everyone’s problem.

Development processes

The Agile movement is popular – and why not? It’s a feel-good set of aesthetic principles unencumbered by a development process. XP, Scrum, and Kanban let us throw off the chains of heavyweight development methods and get back to coding.

This is no way to achieve reliable, repeatable results. It’s de-evolution in action, a return to the days of late-night hack attacks and reliance upon the heroic contributions of uncommonly talented superprogrammers. Too many companies are betting their futures on this family of untested, unproven non-methods.

CASE tools and formal methods were no fun – I get that. They sacrificed flexibility and improvisation and even personal fulfillment for reliable, repeatable results. They weren’t the fastest way or the most enjoyable to get from Point A to Point B, but they did guarantee you’d get there. You can’t say that about Scrum.

Platform fragmentation

It was a big deal when we went from building Windows apps to building net-enabled apps that split program logic along the well-established seam between lightweight clients and back-end servers. But that was nothing. In the very near future, we’ll be asked to deliver apps that run properly on arbitrary hardware with dramatically varying specs, all running different operating systems. It’s an unprecedented challenge for the software development community.

The traditional approach has been for IT to set up a list of approved hardware and software platforms, and thereby to limit the demands on application developers. But that discipline has broken down. You can’t keep your company’s workforce from bringing in their new tablets and smartphones, and from demanding that these devices be given access to corporate apps. The security concerns alone are daunting – how do you keep your network secure when the CEO misplaces his iPad in an airport lounge on another continent?

And don’t get me started on cloud computing. The security implications alone should give you serious pause. Rearchitecting your apps may not take as long as you fear, but the split between your resources and your cloud vendor’s servers will remain brittle. I lived in San Francisco long enough to know you don’t build something important on a fault line.

Inadequate tools

If I read the surveys correctly, you probably don’t remember the transition from DOS programming to Windows. I remember it well – I was at the heart of it. The programming tools and languages that had served us well in the single-tasking, character-mode environment were inadequate to the demands of GUI programming. The industry responded with visual programming environments, object-oriented programming languages, application frameworks, and plug-in reusable modules. Eventually these tools allowed us to cut the challenges of Windows programming down to size.

What tools and languages are addressing today’s challenges? Python? Ruby? C#? Honestly, they all seem to be addressing niche problems. It seems to me we’re being sent into this battle empty-handed. Or am I missing something?

Yes, these state-of-the industry rants are supposed to be posted in December or January. I’ve broken one of the unwritten laws of tech bloggers, and the authorities will no doubt crack down on me. But I had to get this off my chest.

Am I the only one who has noticed that we’re in deep, deep trouble?

Web recommendation: The evocative phrase “Internet of Things” always catches my attention. Here’s a rare substantive discussion of what the term refers to, by Google’s Vinton G. Cerf, a U.S. Medal of Technology recipient, ACM Turing Award winner, Japan Award winner, etc., etc. 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 has rediscovered the joy of peanut butter.

You gotta hand it to the guys at RIM. After a terrible 2011, culminating in the removal of its chief executives, the company is still kicking. Like the Duracell bunny, the company keeps going and going and going.

Service outages, eroding market share, layoffs, plunging stock prices...the news has been nothing but bad for RIM. But the Canadian company, under the leadership of new president and CEO Thorsten Heins, isn't giving up.

RIM's latest strategy is to encourage the development of new apps for the BlackBerry platform. And just how will RIM woo developers? By bribing them.

Until February 13, every Android developer who ports an app to the BlackBerry's virtual Android environment, the Android App Player, will receive a 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

The arrangement was announced in a tweet by RIM vice-president of developer relations Alec Saunders. To qualify, developers must submit their Android apps to RIM's App World before Valentine's Day.

Introduced in April 2011, the PlayBook has been one of RIM's disappointments, selling a few hundred thousand units compared to Apple's tens of millions. One barrier to the tablet's adoption has been the relative scarcity of applications – hence RIM's announcement.

The 16GB PlayBook is widely available online for $299 or less.

Web recommendation: Well. This is horrifying, cool, and I suppose promising. What a crazy future we appear to be headed toward. 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. It snowed so hard in Serbia yesterday that someone has posted a YouTube video of himself snowboarding the streets of Belgrade, towed by a car. Darwinism in action or just another day in the Balkans? You be the judge.

Here's an astonishing fact. According to a series of studies conducted by the Pew Research Group, nearly a third of all American adults own tablet computers or e-book readers.

Pew says holiday gift-giving was responsible for rapid growth in the installed base. In just two or three weeks—from mid-December to early January—the percentage of adults who owned tablet computers nearly doubled, rising from 10 to 19 percent. The percentage of adults owning e-book readers likewise grew from 10 to 19 percent. Pew says the number of Americans owning either a tablet or an e-book reader reached 29% in January.

This is good news for tablet makers, obviously. Apple says it sold 15.43 million iPads during October, November, and December of 2011, resulting in record revenues and profits. Sales have been strong for Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Samsung as well.

It's not clear at this point whether sales will continue at December's pace, or if the installed base experienced a one-time growth spurt due to holiday gift-giving.

In either case, the tablet/reader world is now too big to ignore. Apps, Web sites, and net-enabled content all need to take tablet form factors and user-interface quirks into account.

What the new mobile platforms lack is the kind of “killer app” that rocketed previous platforms to success. That's an opportunity for developers. There's a substantial pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow for the firm that creates a gotta-have-it app for tablet/reader systems, whether for consumer or business use.

It's time to put on your thinking cap!

Web recommendation: Who doesn't love geeky t-shirts? I laughed out loud at some of the designs at Sexy Geeks and I bet you will too. J.D. says check 'em out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He currently suffers from a stiff neck, no doubt because he spent all day hunched over the screen of this laptop.

Could 2011 possibly have been a worse year for Research in Motion Ltd. and its BlackBerry platform? Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong for the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry and PlayBook devices.

Here are some of the moments RIM would surely prefer not to press into its scrapbook.

First, of course, there were the BlackBerry service outages that outraged users and sent many customers to their nearest Apple stores. For a period of several days in October, RIM seemed unable to keep its BlackBerry network running.

Then there's the issue of stock price. RIM's share of the smart-phone market has dropped precipitously this year, from 24 percent of the U.S. smart-phone market last year to just 9 percent this year. The stock price has seen a similar drop. RIM stock traded for as much as $70.54 per share during 2011 before dropping to the low teens. The current price is hovering around $13.

RIM hoped to call the upcoming v. 10 of its BlackBerry operating system BBX – to emphasize its ties to the PlayBook tablet's QNX OS – but was thwarted by a U.S. federal court that concluded the BBX trademark was already taken. So the new release will go by the unexciting name BlackBerry 10.

In Julne the company responded to falling revenues by laying off 2,000 employees, about 10.5 percent of its workforce.

RIM's performance has been so bad that last week the company slashed the salaries of co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to $1 a year. This announcement was made at an analysts' briefing in which the company announced disappointing quarterly financial figures (a 71 percent drop in net income), predicted that no relief from poor financials was forthcoming, and admitted that its next-generation BlackBerry smart-phones would not ship until the second half of 2012. The company also revealed disappointing sales of its PlayBook tablet computer.

In November, two RIM vice-presidents traveling from Toronto to Beijing on business boarded the plane drunk and got so rowdy the flight was diverted to Vancouver so they could be booted off the plane – this after “chewing through” restraints airline personnel employed to keep them in their seats. The VPs don't work for RIM anymore, but the bad publicity won't go away.

As if all this weren't enough, a truckload of PlayBook tablets – about $2 million worth – was stolen while en route from Indiana to RIM headquarters in Waterloo, Ont., Canada.

RIM stock has rallied this week based on reports that Amazon, Microsoft, and Nokia have all considered purchasing the beleaguered company. There's no indication that any of these firms are still thinking about making an offer, however. But investors looking to cut their losses are selling and driving the stock price a bit higher.

RIM's BlackBerry products offer unique advantages to corporate customers. The company is still selling millions of phones per quarter. But it's going to take some kind of miracle to halt the plummeting fortunes that have plagued it in 2011.

Web recommendation: Want to see a simple IFRAME tag crash the 64-bit version of Windows 7? You can see the BSOD pop up here. 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 works from home, generally without shoes.

Poor RIM. The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone has seen its market share steadily decline, and its attempt to engage in the tablet wars have been largely underwhelming to this point. Now, on top of

that -- which more significantly has pushed RIM's stock price down into the range of its five-year low as of today -- the company has had to abandon the BBX name it gave it new operating system in October due to a trademark suit. It seems some small software company in New Mexico had already trademarked BBX, and a temporary restraining order was issued to prevent RIM from using BBX.

So now its next-generation operating system will henceforth be known as BlackBerry10, which the company says “reflects the significance of the new platform and will leverage the global strength of the BlackBerry brand while also aligning perfectly with RIM’s device branding.” BBX, of course, was the company's attempt to tie BlackBerry to the underlying QNX operating system on which it is based.

Blackberry's 52-week high was over $70; it was trading today at about $16.81. It has bigger fish to fry, frankly, than the name of its operating system.

Source code for version 4.0 (actually version 4.0.1) of Android is now available for download from Google. Get the code here.

The latest release of the Android OS, code-named Ice Cream Sandwich, is intended to run on both smart phones and tablet computers. The first announced Android 4.0 device is the Galaxy Nexus smart phone from Samsung. The Ice Cream Sandwich source code available for download from Google assumes a Nexus target. Bloggers and new sites speculate that the Nexus will be released for retail sale on November 17, at least in Europe. Canadian telecom operators Bell and Virgin are expected to ship the Nexus in December, with Rogers and Telus following in January 2012. Rumor-mongers expect Verizon so ship the Nexus first in the U.S., probably by the end of November.

According to Google software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru, who announced the availability of Android 4.0 source code, developers who download Ice Cream Sandwich code will receive the entire Android source code tree, which includes 3.x (Honeycomb) code. Google had not previously released Honeycomb source code.

For more information, check out the Android Open Source Project home page.

Web recommendation: Professor Orin S. Kerr of the George Washington University Law School attempts to put a stake through the heart of the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in his recent testimony before the House of Representatives subcommittee on crime, terrorism, and homeland security. According to Kerr, the CFAA criminalizes the everyday actions of millions of innocent Americans who use the Internet in routine ways. “Any of them,” Kerr says, “could fast arrest and criminal prosecution.” A PDF file of Kerr's testimony is available here. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He doesn't much care for burek.

Digital rights management, or DRM, is a catch-all term that refers to license agreements and technologies intended to protect the rights of content providers from would-be pirates. It is DRM technology that Apple uses, for example, to prevent unlimited duplication of songs from its iTunes store.

I've been looking at tablet computers, including the Amazon Kindle and B&N's recently updated Nook. English-language books are hard to come by here in Serbia, and they're expensive when you find them. So I've been thinking that I should feed my addiction to literature with an e-reader of some kind.

The problem with most e-books is that they suffer from draconian DRM restrictions. Most user licenses cover only a single hardware device, so if you want to use the tablet one day and the laptop another, you need to buy a second copy of the book. Some e-book publishers tie their offerings (officially if not practically) to their own software. Copying, printing, sharing, and reselling are typically not allowed. It's complicated – the relevant restrictions on a particular book may come from the publisher, the distributor, or the e-reader's platform vendor. Individual titles from the same publisher or vendor may have different restrictions.

Amazon made headlines recently when it opened the Kindle Owners' Lending Library for e-books. Reality doesn't live up to the headlines, however. First, the service is available to Kindle users only. Second, it is available only to members of Amazon's $79/year Amazon Prime program. Third, the service is limited to one book per month, one book at a time. Finally, the service is currently limited to about 5,000 titles, a list that consists largely of public-domain and self-help books.

You're better off going to your local public library. Seriously. Public libraries across North America are now making e-books available for check-out, often at no charge. (You can access libraries' offerings with a free e-reader app called OverDrive if you've a mind to. The company's Web site even helps you locate nearby libraries to lend you books.)

The complicated e-books ecosphere is just the latest example of the fractious world of digital rights management. Vendors are lending toward a streaming model, in which they retain all ownership of digital content, offering users only a limited one-time right to view it. Users, understandably, would prefer to store content on their devices or in the cloud, and access it multiple times on an unlimited number of arbitrary devices. The marketplace is a mixed-up mess of compromises between these two poles.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a thoughtful checklist of issues to consider in the e-books world at this page: Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers. It's well worth reading.

Web recommendation: Call me a cockeyed optimist – I have a good feeling about Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). The latest version of Google's operating system for mobile devices is a major release that's intended to power both smartphones and tablets. Google has promised to release the source code to developers so they can fine-tune their offerings. Why develop for Ice Cream Sandwich? ZDNet blogger Ed Burnette has combed through the ICS SDK and emerged with a handful of compelling reasons: Top 10 Features in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He enjoys the occasional game of cribbage.

Congress is currently working on a bill that would cause significant alteration of the way the Internet works. Variously called the Protect Intellectual Property Act (the Senate version), the Stop Online Piracy Act (the House version), and the E-PARASITE Act (the House version), this legislation would make it much easier for the government to shut down or block access to Web sites suspected (or merely accused) of committing or facilitating certain copyright or trademark violations.

The bill in its various forms enjoys the support of music and motion-picture industry trade groups, who despite record revenues and profits seem to be almost comically frightened of the potential for pirates to disrupt their revenue streams.

Opponents of the legislation call it “the end of the Internet as we know it” and claim it “would officially bring Internet censorship to the U.S. as a matter of law.”

I support legal protection of intellectual property. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't – I've collected decades of paychecks based on my generation of intellectual property for various companies. I believe that copyright, trademark, and patent regulations generally do more good than harm.

But SOPA/PIPA is bad law. It goes much too far. It gives government too much power to harm businesses and people before their culpability has been legally established. It criminalizes behavior that benefits the very enterprises the legislation has been drafted to support.

CNET's Molly Wood provides this explanation of the legislation's implications:

SOPA would allow rights-holders to get court orders to take down Web sites or blacklist entire domains based on accusations of infringement. The "infringements" themselves can constitute a single link on a single page of a site, or even an accusation that the site is taking steps to "avoid confirming a high probability" of infringement. Let me translate: if someone, anyone, who holds a copyright or trademark on anything, thinks you're deliberately not doing anything about something they consider infringement, they can get your site taken offline and there's virtually nothing you can do to stop them. What?

There's more, and the "more" is even more insidious. The bill would also allow a rights-holder to send an infringement notice to an ad network like Google or a payment processor like Mastercard or Visa. In that case, with zero legal proof of infringement, the ad networks or payment processors would have five days to stop doing business with the accused site--an accuser can kill the alleged infringer's business, with, again, no proof or legal recourse.

CNET's Larry Downes has written a detailed and objective report on the legislation: If you're inspired to read more, click here. Ars technica's take is here.

The good folks at fightforthefuture.org have set up a Web service that helps you write your Congressional representatives about the bill. If, like me, you'd like to do your part to torpedo the legislation, click here (there's an informative video, too). Or sign the We the People petition at whitehouse.gov by clicking here.

Web recommendation: The good folks at Journalism.org – the Pew Research Center's project for excellence in journalism – have completed a study of how tablet computers have changed the way people read the news. Among the report's findings are demographic details about the people who use tablets. Pew concludes that tablet users are better educated, more likely to be employed, and more wealthy than non-users. Is this information relevant to developers of tablet apps? Sure – it's always good to know more about your target users. The report is fascinating. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He once met Salman Rushdie.

Android 4.0 – familiarly known as Ice Cream Sandwich – was introduced on October 18 at the Hong Kong launch event for Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone.

Android is Google's (mostly) open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets. Since version 1.5, major releases of the operating system have been named for sweet foods: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo (frozen yogurt), Gingerbread, and Honeycomb. Ice Cream Sandwich is the semi-official nickname for version 4.x of the OS.

Source code for the operating system has generally been available to developers, but Google broke that tradition with version 3.x, Honeycomb. The company's explanation suggested that in their eagerness to get the OS ported from phones to tablets, Google engineers had indulged in some hacks and shortcuts that might tarnish Android's reputation or encourage developers to rely upon temporary kludges.

Given Google's unwillingness to part with Honeycomb source, developers have naturally wondered if the code for v. 4.0 would be similarly embargoed.

An unofficial answer is found in an email message written by Google engineer Dan Morrill. The email was subsequently cited in a Google+ post by self-described Android geek Jean-Baptiste Queru. At this point, Google has made no official corporate announcement.

It appears, however, that the company will release Android 4.0 source code to developers once the OS is “available on devices” (according to Morrill's email). Since Samsung's Galaxy Nexus will be out next month, Android geeks like Queru speculate that Ice Cream Sandwich source code will follow shortly.

I'll follow up with more news once a release date is confirmed.

Web recommendation: Perhaps you've noticed that the tech world has contributed more than its share to the universe's supply of offbeat characters. Among my favorite techie iconoclasts is the remarkable Richard P. Feynman, whose contributions to physics are exceeded only by his cynical, sometimes sophomoric sense of humor. I enjoyed both his autobiographical books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) and What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Further Adventures of a Curious Character). Today, I'm happy to point you to YouTube's collection of Feynman videos – specifically the Fun to Imagine monologues on physics. Great stuff! J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.

With the release of several new tablets based on Android, and the update of the Barnes and Noble Nook Color, is Apple's iPad still the most important tablet? Better yet, is it the only one you develop applications for?

Today, Sony announced that it will be releasing two Android-based tablets come fall 2011 in yet another attempt to compete with the iPad. Will this attempt be successful? it seems consumers are still mystified by Jobs' magical device; and yet retailers continue to announce new tablets, each one hoping to be more successful than the last.

But what about you, developers? How do you feel about developing for iOS and the Honeycomb version of the Android software? Do you think it is time to consider Android-based tablets true players in the space? Are applications developed with a different audience in mind for Android? Who is your target market when developing for the iPad? For Android? Or even for the PlayBook?

The PlayBook, launched by BlackBerry in April, is yet another interesting device in my opinion – is it even considered? Does the fact that the PlayBook does not fully support Flash or standard tablet functions (like email) deter you from creating apps in WebWorks or the BlackBerry OS for tablets platform?

We’re working on a story on this topic and would greatly appreciate your feedback. Have something to say? Comment below, email me or Tweet at me (@giornalista515) with the hashtag #sdtablets. And don’t forget to follow @SDTimes for all the news, questions and stories we post on our site. And like us on Facebook for even more news.