Hopefully you watched Forrester's Stefan Ried present his webinar on cloud brokering and the many opportunities for different kinds of companies to exploit this technology. Part of Stefan's conversation included an explanation of the evolution to a unified cloud broker. If you missed it, you can catch up with it here. As 2013 begins, it's a natural time to explore where cloud brokering is headed. A cloud broker is the intersection of infrastructure, software and consultancy. Naturally, technology is a key enabler for a service provider adopting the broker role but it also impacts business models and consultancy.
Cisco disclosed late Thursday that it has agreed to sell its Home Networking Business Unit, which includes its Linksys routers, to privately owned Belkin International. Terms were not disclosed. Cisco bought Linksys in 2003 for $500 million worth of common stock but has been shedding its consumer interests like the Flip video camera lately to focus on commercial sales and Linksys was reportedly unlikely to fetch anywhere near the price Cisco originally paid for it.
The name SCJP is still hot for any Java professional looking for programmer certification even after Oracle’s takeover and renamed to OCPJP. What the abbreviation implies for SCJP and OCPJP? SCJP - Sun Certified Java Programmer is the certification name previously referred by Sun Microsystems. OCPJP - Oracle Certified Professional for Java Programmer is the certification name referred by Oracle after takeover. The OCPJP/SCJP exam is based on Java SE versions like below: OCPJP 7 was designed and released by Oracle (exam code 1Z1-804) and it is based on JDK 7. The exam introduced new concepts like try with resources, multi catch exception handling, using underscore (_) in numbers, diamond operator, NIO2 and JDBC 4.0. The exam also added design patterns section to tests Singleton and DAO pattern knowledge. OCAJP 7 is the pre-certification requirement to take OCPJP 7 exam.
Innovation doesn’t just happen… it evolves out of business desires and it frequently involves changing your own view of the IT value statement. This article focuses on one of the key components needed to make the shift from maintenance to an innovation IT philosophy, Business Service Reliability. As a progressive IT department you must understand exactly what it is, how you can manufacture Business Service Reliability in real time so that you can measure and report your contribution in business language, and how adopting the framework shifts your organization into an innovative business partner. Because of our long-lived traditional IT department philosophies, most IT organizations, whether or not they realize it, focus almost exclusively on component availability rather than the overall reliability of their business services and the related customer interactions. The problem, of course, is that you can achieve decent availability metrics for individual tiers of IT services – but still wind up with customer interactions (the business services) that are unpleasant. And frequent painful customer experiences drive customers and their money away from your company. They cause your customers to say bad things about you… in public and online. They undermine your credibility, so that the business sees you as a maintainer of poor systems and an overall liability, not an innovative business partner. The shift to innovation starts with your customer, and understanding what gives them a good experience, and proactively transforming your operating model to manufacture what the customer wants.
Component-oriented development has many architectural advantages. In spite of this, many developers tend to solve problems the monolithic way on the first go. This article demonstrates how a monolithic design can be modified to achieve component-based design. During this conversion process, the necessity of Component Models and Frameworks are highlighted. The article demonstrates the componentization of an example monolithic application using a simple homegrown component model and framework developed by the authors. Let us assume that we need to implement a simple E-store business application. The application needs to cater to the following simple business use cases for a single actor – the consumer.
The Java Designer’s general principle to architecting high scale or low scale application is choosing between EJB Centric Design (with EJB) or Web Centric Design (without EJB). OCE EJB Certification covers all design/developer knowledge required to implement Enterprise Java Bean Components. The latest Java EE 6 Certification for business component developer is divided into two certifications - EJB and JPA. These two certifications are completely different from previous SCBCD/OCPJBCD certification. The Java Designer's general principle to architecting high scale or low scale application is choosing between EJB Centric Design (with EJB) or Web Centric Design (without EJB). OCE EJB Certification covers all design/developer knowledge required to implement Enterprise Java Bean Components.
*&%#* The system is running slow again! Now what? Is there a space hog application sucking up all my resources? Did we just crash? No, must not say that word...must not say that word... ...still running, just sloooowly. I wonder if anything new has been installed… Nice if they told me. I overheard that something new might have been installed last week. Could there be a memory leak? Are they checking for one? Are they looking in the right place? Hide and seek with a leak is NO fun. How many times have you sat staring at your monitor until your eyes burn and blur, trying to figure out where the problem lies? There are so many places to look for a leak, that it is virtually impossible to find manually. And how do I tell the difference between a leak and increased demand? The symptoms can be similar. It is important to analyze all of the leak possibilities, because at the end of the day, if you are leaking memory in the JVM, you will find an increase in the heap and an increase in GC activity, culminating in hangs or blocks and finally, OutOfMemory exceptions. If the Java code is meant to run on a server 24 hours a day, then memory leaks can become significant. Even the smallest leak in code that is run continuously will eventually result in the JVM exhausting all of the memory available.
A tester friend of mine recently came to me with a complaint that I think is fairly common in the testing community. He said, “Every time there is a new release of the software for us to test, we have to rework our testing scripts.” I’ve heard this complaint throughout my career, not only in performance testing but in functional testing with automation tools as well. This state of affairs arises from three fairly straightforward observations: Change is inevitable. Everything changes, and in no industry is this more apparent than software development. It makes no sense for testers to ask developers to stop changing the code, but it does make sense to encourage wise changes. Developers and testers don’t always communicate well. The proverbial wall between developers and testers is still quite formidable. When developers throw a new version over the wall to be tested, too often they’ve given little thought to how it will be tested. All testing tools are not created equal. Some make it easier to identify and handle changes than others. If your testing tool is designed to handle change well, then your entire team is better positioned to embrace change rather than fear it.
EMC said Tuesday that it means to offer its cloud-based online file-sharing service Syncplicity, acquired last May, with its Isilon and Atmos widgetry so customers can store files as in the cloud as well as on-premise. The stuff’s in beta. It’s supposed to increase productivity, flexibility and ease of management, and reduce compliance risks.
Avnet Embedded, an Avnet unit by way of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, has launched Open Compute Project (OCP) Innovation Labs as both technology showcases and development labs for users, developers and partners to design, deliver and integrate cost-effective, power-efficient compute, storage and networking solutions. It says the lab will provide the OCP community with local and remote access to resources offering “hands-on” enablement of platform and configuration testing, hardware and software validation, performance tuning and community innovation. Avnet will bring together the hardware, connectivity and technical support resources to assist developers with application creation.
Am I the only person who thinks that we need a clear, well understood and unambiguous determine if the development process that you are following can be classified as Agile development process? Do you necessarily have to have a small, co-located, cross-functional team to be able to claim that your process is indeed agile? If you go by what agile thought leaders are saying then “small”, “co-located” and “cross-functional” is no longer considered a necessary condition for classifying a process as agile.
EPractize Labs offers mock exam simulator with study guide for OCEJWCD 6 (SCWCD 6) certification and it was released during OCE Web Component Certification beta stage itself. The software kit, OCEJWCD 6 Certification Training Lab Kit contains 706 practice questions with brief explanations for Quiz and Mock Exams.
I was programming in C++ for a living when I fell in love with Java. It was an unintended affair. At the time, I was following a trend with the limited language of C++, which didn’t even have operator overloading or templates, but boasted simplicity and the ability to write the code once and run it anywhere (otherwise known as WORA). But Java came along and changed everything. In fact, despite what most people say about Java in the mobile age, I still find it relevant, useful and an important coding tool going forward. Java’s WORA was much maligned during its early years, but people tend to forget how difficult things were before Java came along. Java was designed as a language of minimalism: There are less ways to accomplish a certain task, but that also makes it easy to go back in and make changes or corrections. With free and open tools, it made tackling the issues of platform defragmentation easier than ever.
I must admit that before I began reading this book I truly thought it was going to be another twisted story of an attempt at agile that failed in everyone's eyes except for those that needed to say it was a success. That is what I am used to. It is kind of like when I am on a product reference call to CIO. The product is always great and the company who sold it is always wonderful. Why some people think the CIO is going to say they didn't do their due diligence when picking a vendor, and the product and company we are asking about sucks, is beyond me? They never do. The same is true of almost all the agile projects I have seen. They end over budget, buggy, and pretty much the same way most projects end that use any other process, but they are always deemed a success by those involved. I was ready to tell myself I was correct in my assumption when I got blasted on page 2 with the Agile Manifesto, but decided to give them to the end of the chapter. In the next section of the chapter they caught my attention with the last of a list of 6 topics which was their take on Agile/Lean Principles. Number 6 was practitioners should define agile/lean practices.
Remember Microsoft’s Surface? Well, Lenovo’s got this thing called the IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC that it’s touting as the first “interpersonal computer.” It’s a Window 8 dingus with a 27-inch screen that can be laid down or stood up so four people can use it all at once as though it was a big board game, which went fitted out with paddles and joysticks appears to be its main purpose. Surface, now called PixelSense, was designed for store displays and other commercial applications. The Table PC’s screen, which is the size of eight iPads sewn together, is said to respond to 10 fingers touching it at the same time. Photos and videos can be rotated. It weighs 15lbs and will cost $1,699 this summer when it goes on sale.
There are many ways to enter into IT field as a programmer or tester, but the most powerful and demanded language in any software industry is Java.This article simplifies your Java learning and offers a simple application to start your programming in as lesser than 10 minutes. You can find tons of definition about Java on web; my answer is simple “Programming Language to develop any kind of application with Object Oriented approach and it can run anywhere”. For example, you need to develop an application to track your daily expenses on your PC. The application can be developed by Java by the following manner.
The certification trend for Java preparation is moved from old SCJP to new OCAJP after Oracle’s Java 7 certification release. SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer) is the certification name previously referred by Sun Microsystems for Java 6 and prior versions. The certification has been re-published and rebranded after Oracle takeover Sun Microsystems. There will be only one program level certification for Java prior to Java 7 but after Java 7, Oracle introduced two certifications.
The guy who runs IBM’s big services unit that means so much to it – pulling in maybe 57% of its revenues – is going to retire on March 31. Mike Daniels was supposedly in contention to replace former CEO Sam Palmisano but lost out to sales chief Ginni Rometty a year ago. He’s been with the company for 36 years and was reputed to have cut costs and tickled Blue’s margins. IBM has yet to name a replacement. The company said responsibility for the group would fall to Bridget van Kralingen and Erich Clementi with both reporting to Rometty. Kralingen, 49, runs the group that provides consulting services and develops and manages software apps. Clementi, 54, runs the part of the business that outsources technology systems and business functions such as CRM.
With the end of year approaching, I find myself looking back at some of our new projects in the second half of 2012 and studying the commonalities. We remain focused on Fortune 500 companies where applications are global, complex, transactional and virtualized – where the need for analytics to automate performance management is greatest – and where the business case for proactive IT operations is most compelling. However, I have noticed a recent trend of an increasing number of new projects emerging across wider industry sectors and application types. I interpret this as a sign that the market for predictive analytics for IT is maturing, and that our investment in an open analytics and integration API platform is paying off by allowing us to integrate to virtually any new data source during the implementation stage.
“There’s been a lot of talk about cloud in Europe and that means there’s a lot of demand for cloud and also for data center space,” explained Jelle Frank van der Zwet, Manager Cloud Segment at Interxion, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
There are quite a few academic papers and products inspired by the vision of memory-centric DBMS. Most of modern databases serving business applications can already fit within large server RAM available today (2TB). DBMS are heading to memory centric designs and implementation. Contemporary large servers are routinely configured with 2TB of RAM. It is thus possible to fit an entire average size OLTP database in memory directly accessible by CPU. There is a long history of academic research on how to best utilize relatively abundant computer memory. This research is becoming increasingly relevant as databases serving business applications are heading towards memory centric design and implementation. If you simply place Oracle RDBMS's files on Solid State Disk, or configure buffer cache (SGA ) large enough to contain the whole database, Oracle will not magically become an IMDB database, nor it will perform much faster. In order to properly utilize memory, IMDB databases require purposely architected, configured, balanced and optimized hardware ( CPU, RAM, Flash, busses, cluster interconnect ), as well as RDBMS software written with RAM as center point in mind. IMDB's main premise is that data primarily resides in RAM and is only persisted to disk for protection and auxiliary functions. Data structures, methods and processes typically associated with an RDBMS ( index types, join methods, data layout, internal data flows and processing ) need to be (re)designed with RAM-centric axiom in mind.
In "Final Parameters and Local Variables", Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz rants against the generalized used of the final keyword in Java code. For him, this is a "trend' and an "idiotic coding standard". I'm a firm believer of the complete opposite. As a software developer, I spend most of my time reasoning about code. Anything that can make this reasoning easier is welcome. Good practices like short methods and descriptive names fall in this category. I believe immutable variables do too. Immutable variables simplify reasoning because they ensure a stable state within a scope, whether it's a whole class or a single method. Having established invariants is a tremendous help in understanding code.
RDBMSs are stable and mature products. While there is nothing radically new on horizon that would challenge Codd's relational theory and related advances in data processing there are some developments that force established vendors like Oracle to come up with new features and products. Column store concept has been around for quite a while. Vendors like HP Vertica grabbed some market share in data warehousing segment with their column store, MPP databases. Oracle Exadata is offering Hybrid Columnar Compression - solution that modifies Oracle standard row based storage (NSM, or row-major) into propriatery format that is probably closer to PAX (as opposed to DSM) classification. Rows of data are reorganized, broken down into columns, compressed and stored in Compression Units which consist of multiple Oracle data blocks. CU is physically implemented as a standard Oracle single column chained row. (Description of CU layout is based on marvelous article written by Oracle expert Jonathan Lewis).
“Racemi is like a moving company – once someone has decided they are going to a private cloud, or a public cloud, we’re the company they call,” stated Lawrence Guillory, CEO of Racemi, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud computing has given birth to a broad range of online services. To maintain a competitive edge, service providers are taking a closer look at their Big Data storage infrastructure in an earnest attempt to improve performance and reduce costs. Large enterprises hosting their own cloud servers are seeking ways to scale and improve performance while maintaining or lowering expenditures. If the status quo of scaling users and storage infrastructure is upheld, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain low cost cloud services, such as online account management or data storage. Service providers will face higher energy consumption in their data centers overall, and many are loath to begin charging for online account access.