Debugging Software

Each year in the Spring we pick a topic to do a survey and this year (no surprise given our mobile initiative), we assembled about a dozen questions covering the development of mobile app’s.

I’ll use this and the next several blogs to cover the results but, as always, the results have been very eye-opening. First, some background on the those who responded.

• 80% participate in some part of the mobile application life cycle: development, test, project management and support.
• We had a nice mix of organizations. Half the responders came from organizations under 1000 people.
• The target(s) for their mobile apps were split along the lines of consumer/customer-only (50%), internal/employee-only (20%) and both consumer and employee (30%).

Given the proliferation of device types and operating systems, one of the trends we were most interested in is how much native vs. HTML5/JavaScript development is being done. Surprisingly given the conventional wisdom that most mobile app’s are written in a native language (e.g. Objective C or Java), we found that 70% of those who responded developed either full HTML5/JavaScript or Hybrid applications.

We’re still doing the slicing and dicing on the survey results to better understand if size of organization, user target, vertical industry, etc. has more or less influence on that 70% number, but overall it validates something else we have been hearing a lot: IT organizations are really struggling to provide mobile users access to enterprise applications and services and that writing custom-code for each device is a losing battle.

Hence, the pendulum is swinging to higher-level languages like HTML5 and JavaScript, aided and abetted by mobile application platforms like JQuery, Titanium and PhoneGap. More on that in our next blog—we’ve got some data on that too.

I’m hearing from my friends in the VC community that Java is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance in terms of importance and innovation. Seems like Java’s maturity, feature set, reliability and supporting ecosystem makes it a great fit for the continuous integration, continuous deployment software processes that are fast becoming the norm.

Not surprising given that perspective, the upcoming JavaOne conference and exhibition is sold out. Now held at the same time as Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, JavaOne is still the place where the very latest products and technologies are on display and where new product announcements are made.

We’ll be there and we’ve got a couple of new things up our sleeve that we will be showcasing for the first time at the show. Stop by our booth #5205 Oct 3-5 and make Java code, performance and security defects a thing of the past.

The networking folks do amazing things when they have the information they need to diagnose issues and make decisions. They use Deep Packet Inspection to inform everything from bandwidth management, equipment outages and security because DPI gives them the absolute ground truth about their network’s behavior.

We’ve just introduced ReplayDIRECTOR 3.5 and while dot releases are not typically something to shout about, this release represents the front edge of our “Deep Application Inspection” initiative that will deliver the same kind of ground truth for application execution that Deep Packet Inspection provides for the network.

RD 3.5 takes our log viewing and amplification capabilities available in the Eclipse IDE and exposes the details in our standard web UI along with information highlighting defect markers, transactions, users and even client screen shots. In upcoming releases we will be adding a wide variety of deep execution detail to the log view and exposing that data not only in our web UI, but in IDE’s and dashboards of complementary diagnostic and profiling products that provide management information across the software development lifecycle.

Because we see and replicate every method call, exception, db call, variable value, code sequence, etc. there is no more precise and comprehensive record of program execution. Deep Application Inspection is the engine for the diagnostic train and everyone from Dev to QA to Security to Operations can get on board to advance their mission of producing and maintaining high-quality, reliable business solutions.