This Week on developerworks Push for ios, XQuery, Spark, CoffeeScript, top Rational content Episode date:

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1 This Week on developerworks Push for ios, XQuery, Spark, CoffeeScript, top Rational content Episode date: [ MUSIC ] LANINGHAM: Welcome to this week on developerworks. I'm Scott Laningham in Austin, Texas with John Swanson in Boston, Massachusetts. Hi John. SWANSON: Howdy, Scott. LANINGHAM: Say hello, John. SWANSON: Hello. LANINGHAM: And John is the developerworks newsletters editor. Last week we had some interesting information about construction going on outside of John's house. Has it improved, John? Or, is the hole bigger or smaller? What's the story? SWANSON: The hole is more impressive and cleaner. Do you want me to show you what I've got here? LANINGHAM: I would love to have a view. I'm not sure we actually shared that with everybody last week. SWANSON: All right. Well, last week, it was just a hole, and this week it's a hole with walls. LANINGHAM: Look at that. SWANSON: So I don't know if that's visible or not. LANINGHAM: Holy smokes. Looks like you're building an Olympic swimming pool out there or something. SWANSON: Nothing that fun, but maybe I'll turn it into a recording studio. LANINGHAM: You could jump out that window. It would be a high dive right out the window if you filled it up with water. SWANSON: I'm ready. A few more weeks of construction, and I'll do a halfgainer. LANINGHAM: Well, that's the John and Scott's personal lives updates for the week. We try to keep it short. We know everybody waits for that with bated anticipation each week. Anyway, moving on to the important business which is developerworks. And again, as we always say, developerworks is IBM's premiere resource for software developers with tools, code and education on IBM products and open standards technology. We are an IBM site. We do have business role within IBM. But developerworks was really founded

2 with that idea of building that developer community worldwide around open standards and open source as well. We talk about it all on developerworks. And that mission, even though I guess it's been 12 years old now, isn't it, John? I mean... SWANSON: That's right... LANINGHAM:...we've been going for a while. SWANSON:...at least. LANINGHAM: It's still clearly at the core of what we do. And we always want to be reminded if we're drifting from that role. So please don't hesitate to send us your comments about what you like or don't like about what we're doing, and we'll do our very best to incorporate those thoughts into our work going forward. So John, newsletter focus for the week. I know you're looking at the feature, right, from the website. SWANSON: The top feature on developerworks is the from the mobile development editorial team, and it's a focus on push notifications, Sending push notifications to ios devices. And of course, ios being the operating system for all those nifty little Apple gadgets that we all know and love, or many of us know and love. LANINGHAM: Sure. SWANSON: I have a couple of them around the house here. LANINGHAM: And push notification is the messaging that comes to you from those apps to let you know when a new message has come in, a calendar entry is popping up, someone has tweeted you, whatever. Right? SWANSON: Exactly, exactly. Now, one of the more common up to this point, the more common messaging format has been SMS...formats, I should say, have been SMS and MMS. That's Short Message Service and Multimedia Messaging Service. Those formats, now that technology is starting to get more sophisticated, especially those smartphones that we are all using, the associated technologies are starting to feel a little more...a little complex, maybe, and maybe they could use a little updating. And one of the drawbacks to...some of the drawbacks to SMS and MMS are that they're perhaps more collection and maybe more expensive than they need to be. We've pushed technology that simplifies matters, or at least that's where it's headed, anyway. There's a little bit of work to be done with push, but Apple and Google are developing push technology and push notification technology, I should say. And this technology is an Internet-based infrastructure that can deliver rich content directly to applications installed on mobile devices, whereas SMS and MMS

3 require a number of things, including a telephone number. Remember telephone numbers, Scott? LANINGHAM: Sure, absolutely. Or cell phone numbers. SWANSON: You still remember those? LANINGHAM: I do. Yes, I do. SWANSON: And that's what this article talks about. It's Michael Yuan's article which describes the push notification technology and how it works on the ios platform. Android, maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later on, but this focuses on the ios platform. And this article shows readers how to incorporate this into their own applications. And he explores some of the drawbacks and challenges of working with push technology, but it really is headed in a direction where it's likely to...well, there's a good chance it will supplant SMS and MMS. LANINGHAM: That's fantastic. And that is, as John said, the feature for this week on the developerworks home page, sending push notifications to ios devices. So, let's go to the home page, John, and take people through what's left of the new highlights for the week. In that section, you'll see under featured content, right down underneath the featured content, we have the rest of the featured content for the week. The next one in the list from XML, XQuery, a better programming language for the database programmer. Most programmers think the XQuery language was developed to satisfy a niche market, a data querying and transforming language designed to handle XML data. In the case of relational databases, the prevailing practice is to use SQL for non-xml data and use XQuery for XML. But this article makes the case that the powerful programming constructs available in the XQuery language make it actually a better programming language than SQL, and that this improvement in expressiveness and ease of use is enough to warrant the design of databases with an increasing emphasis on XML data type. SWANSON: The Information Management team is talking a little bit this week about security, specifically how to restrict database connections using trusted contexts in DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows. They are showing readers how to protect databases against unauthorized access or misuse by unauthorized database users. You can also learn how to mitigate risks by ensuring that users are allowed to connect only from a list of trusted hosts that are known to be secure. LANINGHAM: All right. Moving on from the Linux zone. We have data analysis and performance with Spark. Spark is an upcoming big data analytics solution designed or developed for highly-efficient cluster computing using what's called in-memory processing. And it's an

4 interesting alternative to Hadoop. So this practice session, this article explores multithread and multinode performance with Scala, Spark and it's tunable parameters. That's from Linux. SWANSON: The Rational zone team have put together a compilation of bestofs, and I always love to see best-ofs, and our readers always love to see best-ofs. So the 10 most loved articles about Rational software from They offer a compilation of the most-loved articles published -- Rational articles, that is, published last year on the developerworks Rational section. From Grady Booch to a basic profile for linked data, readers will find what they're most interested in. LANINGHAM: You know, I love Grady. Not enough to send him a Valentine, but he's a wonderful guy. He's always fun to talk to. SWANSON: Give it a shot. I wonder what he'd think. LANINGHAM: And I love, I love top or our favorite article compilations because there's very little writing that has to happen in those. You just, you know, pull a bunch of favorites together and wrap some new copy around them. SWANSON: There you go. LANINGHAM: So people get a kick out of that. Okay. Moving on from the Web Development zone. We have your first cup of CoffeeScript, Part three in this series we've been telling you about, this one on using CoffeeScript on the client. This series, as we've told you, explores the popular CoffeeScript programming language which is built on top of JavaScript. CoffeeScript compiles into JavaScript that is efficient and consistent with many best practices. You can run this JavaScript in a web browser or use it with technologies such as node.js for server applications. Part one of the series explained how to get started with CoffeeScript and explained the perks for developers. Part two described how to use CoffeeScript to solve programming problems. Of course, this article now explains how to create a complete application using CoffeeScript. SWANSON: Readers who swing by the WebSphere zone can learn how to pass objects between CICS Java environments, CICS, C-I-C-S. The Java language is becoming a popular programming language for CICS applications. CICS provides multiple Java environments, each with its own strengths. So passing data objects between the different CICS java environments is an important topic, and this three-part article series offers the details. LANINGHAM: All right. And that wraps up the feature and highlights for this week on ibm.com/developerworks with John Swanson, newsletters editor. Subscribe of course to his newsletter, which you can customize to any form you want in terms of content you want to be alerted about each week at ibm.com/developerworks/newsletter. It's newsletter or newsletters?

5 SWANSON: I work on the English language newsletter. If people want to subscribe in other languages, they have that option. LANINGHAM: But the link ends with newsletter, with no S, right? ibm.com/developerworks/newsletter. SWANSON: That is correct. LANINGHAM: That's where you go to subscribe or to update your subscription in customizable form. Of course, we'll be talking more about Pulse coming up Pulse, which is March 4 through 7 in Las Vegas, the big conference that's put on primarily by Tivoli, but it will cover a lot of topics. And we'll be there covering that conference. And right after that, South By Southwest Interactive is coming up in Austin, Texas, which is a very cool, very youthful, very forwardlooking entrepreneurial event with just...i think last year there were 20,000 people there from all over the world. It was awfully cool, too. So, John Swanson in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Scott Laningham in Austin, Texas. Follow us on YouTube, on itunes, and right here at ibm.com/developerworks. This is this week on developerworks. Talk to you next week. [ MUSIC ]