Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which has been created around the internal complexity of the RAD tools.

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If you live in the U.S., this is the week to gorge on turkey. I wondered out loud last night to my wife if Thanksgiving is the day of the year when the most people eat the same meal. Can any of our overseas readers add to the conversation? Is there a holiday in your country where everyone eats pretty much the same thing? Anyway, before American brains shut down from an overdose of stuffing, here's some developer news you can use.

Oracle announces Plan B for Java

The Java language has continued to evolve over the years, adding features such as Generics. There's an ambitious wishlist of things that developers would like to see in Java 7, but apparently not enough time to do it all and still get a timely release out. As a result, the JCP has decided to forego some of the goodies until Java 8, which is not expected to grace the world until late 2012.

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Here's what's new for the trendy developer this week:

Java's future on Apple: Slightly less in doubt

Last week, it looked like Apple was all "You're not welcome here, Java." In the changeable world that is Jobsland, this week Apple was offering to marry the language, reiterating their support for Java in OS X, and indicating that they would be supplying code and resources to the OpenJDK project.

As I've noted before, this makes sense for Apple, because it gets them out of the JVM business, and makes Oracle the one-stop shopping solution for all your JDK and JRE needs. It also means that the Mac can be added as a regression-tested target for a new version of Java, hopefully avoiding the kind of Java versioning snafus that rendered IBM's SPSS (or is it PAWS this week?) statistics …

The Apache Software Foundation’s latest statement on the Java Community Process highlights continued dissatisfaction and dissent from Oracle’s stewardship and involvement in open source software.

This comes after some ups and downs for Oracle and its oversight of Java and other open source software that was previously under the auspices of Sun Microsystems. Oracle started off on a rough path when it sued Google over its implementation of Java in Android without preemptively or clearly stating that it was not attacking open source. At about the same time, it let OpenSolaris die a slow, somewhat confusing death. …

JCP election results. Funding for Acquia and Continuent. Fedora 14. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# The Java Community Process election results are in.

# Acquia closed an $8.5m series C funding round and announced that it has tripled its customer base in 2010.

# Continuent appointed Robert Hodges CEO and confirmed details of $5m funding from Aura Capital.

# Red Hat …

With the release of MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 2.2, there is now the ability to monitor queries using the Query Analyzer (QUAN) without needing the agent proxy to be running. You can use a .NET or JDBC connector plugin to directly gather the query statistics. In the example below, we will use the MySQL Enterprise Plugin for Connector/J.

First, make sure both the Connector/J, the Connector/J plugin and the Apache Commons Logging jars are in the $CLASSPATH. At the time of writing, these are the files needed:

mysql-connector-java-5.1.12-bin.jar
c-java-mysql-enterprise-plugin-1.0.0.42.jar
required/commons-logging-1.1.1.jar

Then, add the plugin to the connection string so that it changes from something like this:

conn = …

Microsoft sues Motorola. Oracle says no to LibreOffice. Time to fork Java? And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Microsoft is suing Motorola over alleged Android patent infringements.

# Oracle confirmed to SJVN that it will not be working with the Document Foundation on LibreOffice.

# Sean Michael Kerner reported that Red Hat has settled an alleged patent infringement case with IP firm Acacia Research.

# Greg Luck …

Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is over!  While I had to leave early Tuesday (the paying job takes precedence over the volunteer job), there are many things to talk about that happened while I was at OpenWorld this year.  I’ll attempt to cover a few of them in this posting.

Saturday Night, the ODTUG Board and YCC staff got together to discuss our plans and obligations for the week.  With Sunday User Forum, MySQL Sunday, and Oracle Develop to attend to during the week, along with many other meetings, this was an important start to the week.  It was nice for everyone to see everyone again, and to recharge and energize for the tasks ahead during the week.  Below is a picture of fellow Board Members Barbara Morris and Monty Latiolais at the dinner at Annabelle’s Bar and Bistro.

Saturday Evening Dinner before OpenWorld 2010

Sunday morning, I had a …

Oracle launches Unbreakable Kernel, updates MySQL and Java plans. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Oracle launched its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

# Oracle announced the release candidate of MySQL 5.5.

# Oracle outlined its plans for Java platform. JavaWorld has the details.

# Novell and SAP have collaborated on SUSE …

I'm the boards of two companies (Pentaho, Revolution Analytics) that are starting to see a lot of customer traction around Big Data. More and more companies in media, pharma, retail and finance are doing advanced analysis, reporting, graphing, etc with massive data sets. It made me wonder what other areas of the technology stack might evolve with the trend towards Big Data.  Obviously, there's new middleware layers like Hadoop and Map Reduce, and we're also seeing the emergence of NoSQL data management layers with Cassandra, MongoDB, MemBase and others.  But what …