Java Web Development BLOG

The Australian Taxation Office is pushing the AUSkey public key infrastructure (PKI) for secure data exchange when submitting tax returns, but Linux users say they have again been left out in the cold.

AUSkey is federal government’s attempt at single sign-on authentication across a range of business and government online services and the ATO has started using it this month.

With AUSkey people no longer need different usernames and passwords for each government agency they have to deal with as one AUSkey “will work for all”.

In the case of tax returns, people can continue to use an ATO digital certificate until it expires – or it is cancelled – and then they will be forced to use an AUSkey. AUSkeys do not expire provided they are used at least once every year.

According to the ATO, it will “no longer issue new ATO digital certificates and renewal and replacement facilities will be switched off. However, you can continue to use your ATO digital certificate until it expires or is cancelled.”

The ATO’s Electronic Commerce Interface (ECI) client software uses the common-use signing interface (CSI) for digital certificates which can be either an AUSkey or ATO digital certificate.

The ECI client is available for Windows and Mac OS X from http://www.csi.business.gov.au.

According to the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, which runs the business.gov.au portal, using the CSI with unsupported operating systems or browsers “is not guaranteed to work reliably or at all”.

Although unsupported, the necessary files for the installation of the CSI on Linux are available from the ATO’s PKI server at: http://pki.ato.gov.au.

However, the compatibility problems Linux users face don’t end with an unsupported CSI. With the introduction of AUSkey, some Linux users are now reporting failures.

Donna Benjamin, director of Melbourne-based open source consulting firm Creative Contingencies, said the forced introduction of AUSkey has resulted in the CSI client not working as it did with the digital certificate.

“For a good long while now I’ve been happily submitting BAS statements online using Linux/Firefox through the ATO Business Portal thanks to some jiggery pokery on the Mac version of the CSI app,” Benjamin said.

“I went to submit my recent BAS only to discover a new message… along the lines of ‘Computer says No’ go get an AUSkey.”

Benjamin said despite claims it is a standards-based Web application, it is “not all that standard after all”.

“I managed to get registered for AUSkey with no problems whatsoever, but when it came time to download it and activate I met with our dear old friend Mr Fail,” she said.

The following error message was then displayed: “Your browser is unsupported and may not work with the AUSkey plugin. Your operating system is not supported by the AUSkey plugin. A list of supported operating systems can be found in the AUSkey FAQs.”

“So whilst in theory it’s a standards-based Web implementation, in practice it’s a Web implementation that rejects a free and open source (FOSS) browser and FOSS operating system,” Benjamin said.

Ironically, the CSI client for Linux uses open source encryption software from the Cryptix Project.

“As I understand it, the current system of ATO digital certificates and CSI will be phased out. I’m prepared to acknowledge the ATO does not have the resources to provide technical support for every combination of OS and browser, but I am not prepared to accept that they are not obligated to have a system that we can access.”

Creative Contingencies IT director Peter Lieverdink, said the AUSkey is distributed as a Windows and Mac OS X client, but right now neither will work with Linux.

“I have run the installer on Mac OS X and Windows and on Windows it installs the Java files somewhere in “Program Files”,” Lieverdink said. “It also installs a browser plug-in wrapper (for IE and Firefox) on Windows with DLLs. So they won’t run on Linux.”

On a Mac, Lieverdink said AUSkey installs Java files which can be copied to Linux, but when he pointed Firefox to the AUSkey portal it returned an error saying the browser is not supported.

“I am 99 per cent confident they [CSI] are the same files on Mac OS X and Linux. AUSkey is either doing an operating system check or something else,” he said. “I even tried to set the browser user agent to ‘lie’ that I was using Mac OS X with both Firefox 3.5 and Safari and both didn’t work.”

Creative Contingencies renewed its CSI digital certificate earlier this year, which Benjamin said is set to last two years. With the introduction of AUSkey in around 24 months there will be no more digital certificate users.

“AUSkey is completely different software so it won’t work unless the current CSI for Linux includes AUSkey and to reverse engineer it is illegal,” Lieverdink said.

“At the end of the day the Web has a wonderful solution to this called a browser certificate and I see no technical reason not to use browser certificates. ID authentication can also be done over the Web.”

Benjamin, an Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) member, said accounting and tax is one of the friction points for small businesses using open source software and that is the “bigger picture” problem.

“This is actually holding back the open source industry in Australia. If software is browser-based it should be standards-based,” she said.

The ATO did not respond for requests to comment.

With rich Internet applications all the rage an open source Web framework dubbed Vaadin promises rapid Ajax development while keeping Java code on the server.

Many RIA frameworks rely on JavaScript libraries and browser plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight, but Vaadin claims to reduce this client complexity by running the majority of the logic on the server.

Vaadin development began in 2000 as an internal product of Finnish Web development company IT Mill. It was officially released as an open source project in December 2007 under the name IT Mill Toolkit 5 and then became Vaadin in 2009.

Vaadin is a collection of user interface components and Ajax technology is used on the browser side.

Developers compose the application user interface from components like Button, Table and Tree and the components use events, listeners and data binding to communicate with each other and the business logic.

Its developers say apps built with Vaadin support all Ajax-capable browsers and are secure as the server-side architecture ensures that the code is “hidden from the world”.

An Eclipse IDE plug-in is available for Vaadin. The plug-in can create applications for private Java servers or Google’s App Engine, client-side widgets, CSS themes and custom user interface components in the WYSIWYG editor.

The plug-in supports Eclipse Java Enterprise Edition versions Ganymede and Galileo.

More than 100 add-ons are available to extend Vaadin. Examples include themes, games and integration with other online services.

For documentation, the Book of Vaadin is available for free online and in PDF format.

Vaadin is available under the Apache 2.0 open source licence.

Oracle, which spent $US7.4 billion to acquire once-high-flying Sun Microsystems, has been losing prominent Sun technologists since shortly after the deal was forged. The acquisition was supposed to give Oracle control not only over such technologies as Sun’s flagship Java implementation and Sun’s Sparc hardware, but access to engineers and developers who were nothing short of celebrities in their field. But it has not worked out that way.

It was not unexpected that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Sun chairman and former CEO Scott McNealy did not make the switch to Oracle. Those high-ranking positions were already taken at the database giant. But the number of former Sun personnel residing in Oracle’s top executive offices is sparse.

In fact, the only Sun alumni found on Oracle’s Web listing of top executives are Executive Vice President John Fowler, who had dealt with Sun hardware; Senior Vice President Cindy Reese, who was a worldwide operations executive at Sun; and Vice President Mike Splain, who also was involved with Sun’s hardware systems operations.

Key departures have included Java founder James Gosling, XML co-inventor Tim Bray, and Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open source officer. After serving as CTO of client software at Sun, Gosling worked for a couple months with the same title at Oracle before leaving in April under what appears to be acrimonious circumstances. Bray, who was director of Web technologies at Sun, also quickly left Oracle, becoming a developer advocate at Google. Phipps, never offered a job at Oracle, is open source strategy director at integrator and identity platform vendor ForgeRock.

Other departures include Sun engineers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who shepherded the development of the JRuby programming language at Sun but joined Engine Yard last summer several months after the Oracle acquisition of Sun was announced. A key developer on the open source Hudson continuous build project, Kohsuke Kawaguchi left in April to form a company to continue working on Hudson.

Sun’s tech leaders say why they didn’t fit in at Oracle

In a blog post, Gosling noted his need for a lawyer after resigning. “I’ve spent an awful lot of time reading these [blog and other] messages and answering as many as I could. Between all this and spending quality time with my lawyer, resigning has been a full-time job (before I quit, several friends said I’d need a lawyer because ‘this is Oracle we’re talking about’ … sadly, they were right),” wrote Gosling, who has not indicated where his next employment would be.

Oracle’s offering, at times, substantial salary cuts to former Sun personnel was likely to result in the development of many small businesses as Sun alumni leave, according to Gosling. In a blog post last week, he offers praise for ForgeRock and consternation for Oracle: “They’re another great little company spinning out of the rubble that Oracle created out of Sun. They do service, support, and development on what used to be called OpenSSO (among other things),” Gosling writes.

“While Sun had open-sourced the code, Oracle still owns the name, so the ForgeRock folks picked a new name: OpenAM (Open Access Manager). OpenSSO is another case where Oracle [ended] the superior product and then sent salesdroids to OpenSSO customers with term sheets that were truly frightening. They did a great job of creating a business for ForgeRock,” he adds.

“Sun and Oracle are very different sorts of companies, not necessarily in a bad way,” says Nutter. Oracle has not been as committed to open source as Sun was, he says. “Sun was basically all open source. That’s basically what they’ve been doing for the past four or five years,” Nutter says. (Oracle declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Nutter cites uncertainty about JRuby as reason for leaving: “We were still excited to work on JRuby and we didn’t have a lot of negative indications, but we didn’t have a whole lot of positive indications that the project would continue. It seemed like a good time to move on to someone willing to fund JRuby.”

Bray revealed little about his departure in a blog post but hinted at animosity: “I’d had an offer to stay with Oracle, which I decided to decline; I’ll maybe tell the story when I can think about it without getting that weird spiking-blood-pressure sensation in my eyeballs. So I reached out to a couple of appealing potential next employers, both were interested, and Google seemed like the best bet,” Bray wrote.

Oracle is about making money; Sun was about inventing technology

Sun and Oracle have had “massively different cultures,” says Forrester Research analyst John Rymer. “I don’t think the Oracle guys respect the Sun guys. The Oracle guys are really expert at making a lot of money, at selling software.” Rymer said. “The Sun guys, they were pretty good at inventing things but they weren’t good at making money. That’s why they got sold.”

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said as much, telling Reuters recently, “The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed.”

Sun’s open source strategy clashed with Oracle’s profit strategy, Rymer says. “If you’re sitting in Larry Ellison’s chair, where he’s all about 20 percent growth and massive amounts of revenue and all that, he looks at [former Sun CEO] Schwartz’s strategy and says, ‘Why would I do that?’ Buying MySQL [as Sun did] on the theory that you could sell all those people servers and storage, that didn’t work,” Rymer notes.

Rymer says, “I wasn’t surprised at all that [Gosling] left. Gosling is more of a research kind of guy. He just didn’t strike me as a guy who would be happy working inside of a big money machine like Oracle.”

“I think the assessment of cultures not fitting is pretty near the truth,” says RedMonk analyst Michael Cote. While Sun sought exploratory, cutting-edge engineering talent, Oracle’s business model has centered on building and buying up successful portfolios, such as Siebel and PeopleSoft, Cote says.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa also acknowledged cultural differences and different agendas at the two vendors: “I think Gosling was an example of that. He’s much more of a sort of a freewheeling spirit.” Oracle, meanwhile, has been much tighter with its messaging and does not like multiple reports going out, he notes. But Hilwa dismisses the notion that the concept of open source presented a clash, since Oracle also is promoting open source.

Oracle eventually could suffer a loss of innovation from the Sun departures, says Forrester’s Rymer. But most of the software products that Sun worked on such as the Glassfish application server are not strategic to Oracle anyway, he notes. (Oracle has expressed intentions to continue Glassfish as a departmental offering.)

Rymer adds, “I still don’t think [Oracle has] figured out the [plan for Sun's] hardware.”

SAP (NYSE: SAP) has inked a deal to acquire mobile and database software maker Sybase (NYSE: SY) for US$5.8 billion in cash — or $65 per share. That translates into a purchase price that is more than 55 percent over Sybase’s trading price before rumors of the deal became public, which was $41.57 per share. The deal, which still requires regulatory and shareholder approval, has prompted much debate: Do the benefits of acquiring Sybase’s mobile application functionality justify the premium SAP is willing to pay?

It is clear that “mobilizing” enterprise applications is a key shift that SAP should focus on, N. Venkatraman, a business professor at Boston University, told the E-Commerce Times. “Still, paying a 60-plus percent premium is staggering.”

In a conference call discussing the acquisition, SAP executives said it would allow the company to grow even faster, especially in the rapidly evolving mobile space.

SAP envisions integrating mobile functionality with its own complex ERP family of applications to give users extensive reach into a business operation — from tracking orders to managing inventory to setting deliveries — directly from their handsets.

Money’s Worth

In fact, SAP, Sybase and their end-users are likely to see far greater advantages from the acquisition than gaining traction in the mobile space, Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions, told the E-Commerce Times. “What intrigues me about this deal is that the companies fit together at a several places — there are a number of complementary areas besides mobile.”

For instance, there is Sybase’s core database and application development, which SAP can use — although admittedly it would require a lot of integration work, Gardner said. “Still it’s a good fit in terms of bringing a higher-performance database into SAP.”

Sybase’s SMS capabilities are also attractive, he said. “Sybase has a large business supplying infrastructure to mobile carriers for their mobile messaging — it is high-performing, text-routing capability. SAP has recognized that the relationship between companies and their customers is moving towards social media capability, or in this case SMS.”

Even the companies’ respective vertical and geographic strengths fit well, noted Gardner. Sybase is strong in financial services and the Asia region; SAP in manufacturing, retail and Europe.

“So SAP paid a premium price, yes, but it was not outrageous. The premium shows what an important buy this is for SAP,” Gardner said.

Mobile Play

There is a good reason, though, why SAP is highlighting the mobile fit and why much of the industry has seized on those capabilities to the exclusion of other synergies. Mobile is an important space that few business software companies have well penetrated, said Cindy Jutras, a vice president in research development at the Aberdeen Group.

“The whole concept of the real-time enterprise and connecting mobile decision makers is going to be significant for several industries,” Jutras told the E-Commerce Times.

Thus far, end-users have been reluctant to embrace the technology — but as they realize its potential, and how well the latest generation of software has become, that will change, she predicted.

“There is going to be huge demand for transactional and enterprise data on the handset,” Jutras said.

Executing the Deal

Indeed, the biggest difficulty for SAP and Sybase is not going to be justifying their marriage but the actual integration.

The two companies are coming from different tech approaches and vastly different corporate cultures, Gardner observed.

“Sybase is based in Northern California — SAP in Germany,” he pointed out. “Sybase was an early Java adopter and has a proprietary approach to development.”

Also, SAP’s track record in successfully merging acquisitions is not as stellar as Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL), which has absorbed countless companies with little upheaval, said Venkatraman.

“BusinessObjects acquisition integration is at best a mixed-success,” he observed. “So, the integration and evolution of the software platform to the mobile arena will be a major challenge that should not be minimized.”

Oracle’s track record is going to be the impetus that will force the two companies to merge well, Gardner predicted. “When you have something like Oracle and what it has accomplished breathing down your neck it helps you focus. SAP knows if it doesn’t make this merger work well, it will have a difficult time competing with Oracle and IBM.”

VMware and Salesforce.com are jointly developing a cloud computing service called VMforce designed for hosting Java applications, executives from the two companies said Tuesday.

Set to be rolled out during the second half of this year in a developer preview, VMforce will make it easier for companies to deploy and manage Java applications in the cloud, said Andrew Dutton, general manager of Asia-Pacific and Japan for VMware, during a conference call with reporters.

Based on the Spring development framework, which VMware acquired last year when it bought SpringSource, VMforce combines Salesforce.com’s cloud-computing infrastructure with VMware’s vSphere virtualization software. This combination will simplify the process of bringing Java applications into the cloud — something that Java developers have been clamoring for, Dutton said.

“Before, they were stuck. There was no clear way through into development for the public cloud,” Dutton said, noting that VMforce will run any Java applications built using Spring.

Cloud computing is a catch-all term that describes a range of Internet-based services, from hosted applications offered as a service to companies that provide the infrastructure for hosting corporate applications. VMforce falls in between, offering a ready-made Java platform that’s built around Spring and the SpringSource tc Server runtime, with access to Force.com, including Salesforce.com’s Chatter social and mobile service, as well as the Force.com relational database and other services.

Details on pricing and the start of commercial availability of the service will come later this year, said Lindsay Armstrong, senior vice president of international sales at Salesforce.com.

VMforce has been the subject of speculation since the two companies first disclosed the name two weeks ago, saying details of the partnership would be disclosed during a webcast on April 27 hosted by Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, and Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com.

Source: www.cio.com.au