SwimOS

My job is convincing people to use free software. Intuitively, you would think it’s easier to sell something that’s free than convincing someone to pay you. It’s not. 

Today, the Java ecosystem remains one of the largest developer communities on planet earth. At over 9 million active developers, the Java programming language is used every day to build and run systems that shape the modern everyday ... [More] experience. That’s why we ultimately decided to architect Swim in Java, and leverage the same patterns and possibilities that made Java the right choice for so many developers. We could keep ourselves busy for years building tools and writing documentation just to support Swim’s Java user community. But instead, one of our most significant efforts recently has been to improve polyglot support for the open source Swim platform. Why? [Less]

Even the most simple chat user interfaces bely a world of architectural complexity. Features like authentication, user presence, chat rooms, user counts, message encryption and countless others represent a significant undertaking. ... [More] However, with the right tools, building an enterprise-scale chat application is not only possible, it can be done relatively quickly. [Less]

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the noble REST API. They’re anywhere and everywhere. REST is the lingua franca of the application world. REST APIs have been the equivalent of software duct tape since Roy T. Fielding published his ... [More] doctoral thesis all the way back in 2000. Whether you’re talking about Google Docs, Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, Waze, Yelp or just about anything else, chances are there are hundreds or thousands of REST APIs are creating relationships between application services. [Less]

The first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. And while the advent of the iPhone was hardly the only catalyst of the smartphone revolution, I consider this to be as good a birthdate as any for one of humankind’s most consequential ... [More] innovations. Since then, smartphones have been adopted faster than any other disruptive technology in modern history. But I’m not actually here to write about smartphones, because I think there was an even more important development that day in 2007. That development that changed the world? It was the announcement of the iOS operating system.In my opinion, iOS changed how humans fundamentally interact with technology, in ways that will far outlast the smartphone era. What I mean is that iOS brought apps into the mainstream. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve been calling application software “apps” since at least 1981. And this didn’t just happen overnight. Until 2010, Symbian was the world's most widely used smartphone operating system. But iOS crystallized the modern notion of how users engage with apps, and made them accessible to users with even the most limited technical ability. Like written language, the printing press, and telecommunications before; apps have changed how we communicate with the world. [Less]

Five years ago when I started tracking media buzz around stateful architectures, I’d see a few articles every month about running stateful containers. That's about when Caitie McCaffrey first shared this awesome presentation about ... [More] building scalable stateful architectures. Since then, the dominant software paradigm has become functional application design. The actor model and other object-oriented paradigms are still in use, but database-centric RESTful architectures are standard means of building web applications today.However, the tides are beginning to shift. Due to innovations like the blockchain, growing demand for real-time applications, the digitization of OT assets, and the proliferation of cheap compute resources at the network edge; there’s renewed interest in decentralized application architectures. As such, there’s also been increased focus on stateful applications. For example, at least five Apache Foundation projects (Beam, Flink, Spark, Samza, and TomEE) are touting statefulness as a benefit today. Modern applications communicate across multiple application silos and must span real-world machines, devices, and distributed data centers around the world. Stateful application architectures provide a way to abstract away the logistical effort of state management, thereby reducing development and management effort necessary to operate massive-scale distributed applications. [Less]

Aggregating data from heterogeneous REST APIs and streaming sources can be a pain. In order to achieve real-time insights or visualizations, developers need to efficiently combine REST and streaming data sources. But streaming data is ... [More] created continuously and storing high volumes of raw stream logs prior to processing requires significant storage and bandwidth resources. Furthermore, just getting data into a database doesn’t help you build an application and it certainly doesn’t help if you’re aiming for real-time performance. So what’s the fastest way to integrate multiple heterogeneous data sources so that developers can aggregate and perform real-time transformations on the new combined data streams? [Less]

I’ve written previously about Scott Clarke’s Greenhouse demo app because it’s a good example of how to build integrations between external frameworks and Swim. While Swim functions perfectly well on its own (for an app built using only ... [More] Swim’s own UI and server libraries, you can check out traffic.swim.ai), sometimes it makes sense to utilize a framework to speed development or simplify the learning curve. Popular frameworks like AngularJS, NodeJS, ReactJS and others have many pre-built connectors, vibrant developer ecosystems, and abundant developer resources available for reference. Swim makes it easy to take advantage of these frameworks, enabling developers to integrate one or more UI and server frameworks together into a shared data fabric. [Less]

How do you evaluate open source technologies, like Kubernetes and Swim, when there's so much hype?