Tiggzi started an a cloud-based visual mobile app builder. You can build HTML5, jQuery Mobile apps connected to any REST APIs. You can also export the app as Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) and use its device API, to get an Android, iOS or Windows Phone app. Tiggzi app builder comes with a powerful REST API editor as as well visual data mapping editor, where you can map services to the UI (and the other way). It’s an excellent fit for the “small” API explosion happening right now. Everyone is exposing their resources as REST APIs and want developers to build apps using their APIs. Most API provides offer some specific functionality such as sending an SMS message and that’s fine and very useful but what happens if you need a custom backend or a place to store app data? Another example is Facebook. Facebook API is obviously very powerful and if you need to post to the Timeline, you can easily do that. But if you are building a ToDo like app, you can’t store your tasks in Facebook. There are a number of backend as a service companies that you can use today but that required signing up for another service. We relized this is a unique opportunity to provide the complete mobile stack for developers: cloud app builder (IDE) and cloud backend services.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Union’s version of America’s Supreme Court, told Oracle last week that it can’t stop the resale of its customers’ castoff software, specifically the stuff that’s downloaded from the Internet. It held that the new owner can download the “used” software from Oracle’s site along with updates and patches covered by the original maintenance agreement. Oracle tried to argue that downloaded software was different from software physically transmitted on a CD or DVD. The decision, which isn’t specific to Oracle, has serious implications for just about every developer. The Financial Times imagines it creating a “multimillion dollar market for second-hand enterprise software licenses” like Microsoft’s or Adobe’s – particularly given all the surplus perpetual licenses available because of layoffs. And, after talking to lawyers, the paper figures “it could also have broader ramifications for other digital products such as film, music and ebooks.”
While JavaScript’s popularity grows daily, it’s not obvious if enterprise developers spoiled by predictable languages like Java or C# will fill comfortable with it. If they won’t – the cost of the JavaScript-based projects will remain high. Just take a look at this code snippet on the right – I’ve been using Firebug,the Firefox add-on to run it. The code is on the right, and the result of invoking the function doIt() is on the left. Yes, it outputs 10 on the console. If you don’t know why it did so, get ready do allocate a substantial time for doing a really thorough testing of your HTML-JavaScript application. People say that if you cut your finger don’t blame the knife. True. Should we even use sharp knives? Yes, if we are very careful and responsible adults. But we shouldn’t give sharp knives to kids. And majority of today’s enterprise developers are kids playing with legos, a.k.a. frameworks. Unfortunately, you can’t get away with creating an enterprise Web application without programming in a raw language. This is when the fun begins. Let’s embrace it, but be careful.
The million dollar question has been "Can an organization move all its applications to a public cloud?". Instead of moving all applications to the public cloud, many organizations are choosing a hybrid approach where on-premise resources can be leveraged and can interact with external resources. A hybrid cloud is a combination of public, private and community clouds. Most private clouds are internal, however there can be situations where private clouds are hosted at a vendor site. For this discussion, I am focusing on the private clouds that are hosted internal to the organization. Utilizing hybrid clouds may require redesigning systems based on a determination of what data resides internally and what data can be moved externally. Generally organizations choose to have critical and sensitive data reside internally and move non-sensitive data outside the organization. Core business applications or services can be retained internally and can interact with the non core applications or services that can reside external to the organization. One of the programs I led in the past used the public cloud to gather non sensitive information and subsequently this data was funneled internally. This information was then manipulated and rendered for applications that performed customer reporting and related business intelligence.
Often we see the workload to a web application measured by throughput. It’s a way of quantifying the volume of requests/responses in relation to time. Transactions per second or TPS is the most common ratio used. A performance test plan usually contains certain throughput goals. The “GO or NO GO” decision for rolling out a new release or architectural change relies heavily upon a web application handling a certain TPS. Management wants a “Pass” stamp, but it’s your job to make sure that the achieved TPS is indeed realistic – not an illusion of phony numbers. My advice is to “keep it real” by generating workloads that represent all the true characteristics of production. Faking it leads to false positive test result: a certain TPS was met and the Pass stamp was awarded, but the conditions were unrealistic. For example, you could achieve a 460 TPS result by hitting mostly lightweight transactions, or by running a low load of virtual users with little or no think time. In each of these cases, the throughput would be “High” but the workload does not represent what’s really happening in production. Not even remotely. What’s worse, if you “Pass” a performance test using these unrealistic methods, you have no idea if the deployment is going to withstand the production workload. If the applications falls over….guess who is on the hot seat? This could be an unintentional outcome, so be sure your tests are setup properly and create a realistic workload.
Terracotta offers data optimization technologies that take current IT capabilities and enable scalability, availability and performance. They offer services, support software and solutions such as BigMemory, which stores “big data” in machine memory for ultra-fast access, Enterprise Ehcache, which plugs into enterprise applications and expedites integration and high-performance scalability, and Quartz Scheduler provides simple and flexible job execution from within execution code. While Big Data is clearly more than a just a buzzword, our data is exploding at an exponential pace, there is a need for solutions that manage big data in all forms. Terracotta offers the ability to store big data in memory (even Terabytes), providing faster access for applications. By keeping big data close, and local, applications can run more smoothly and incur tenfold performance gains.
Node.js, the V8 (Chrome’s JavaScript runtime) based platform for building fast and scalable network applications, is gaining substantial traction among developers and entering the application stack of many silicon valley companies. Like every new technology or piece of software there is enough FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) around Node, so I am going to write … Read More ...
Red Hat is planning to commercialize its 13-month-old OpenShift PaaS later this year when it splits the widgetry into two initial tiers: FreeShift and MegaShift. Until then it’ll be available as a developer preview. FreeShift will offer three small gears, the ability to auto-scale and access to the languages, frameworks and data stores developers like to use. It will leverage community-provided support. Developers using the OpenShift PaaS now will be able to automatically migrate to FreeShift. MegaShift, the initial paid tier, will offer up to 16 gears, and the ability to add storage past the 1GB-per-gear limit in FreeShift. MegaShift users will get support from Red Hat. The platform fee is supposed to be $42 a month with a per-gear-an-hour fee for gears past the first three. However, Red Hat says the pricing is provisional and subject to change.
Surface has reportedly made Microsoft OEMs edgy about competing with their usual ally, especially since Microsoft designs are more like Ultrabooks than rival tablets are. Acer founder Stan Shih thinks Microsoft is using its branded tablets to prod its followers into making their own Windows 8 tablets. And once they do, it will withdraw its own, according to what he reportedly told DigiTimes. Sort of like Google and the Nexus but perhaps also like Google and Motorola Mobility. Selling its own hardware would be less profitable to Microsoft than licensing its software, Shih said, and anyway it will have difficulties with marketing, production management, distribution and after-sales maintenance services.
Roger Sippl, who co-founded Informix a generation ago, then Vantive and Visigenic, all acquired after going public, is staging a comeback with new database widgetry that does real-time data integration from multiple sources in the cloud. He’s been working on it for four years recruiting along the way 20 guys from the old days who are already rich thanks to Roger but still want to be “useful.” Elastic Intelligence, the company he started a few years ago, is going to productize this newfangled virtual relational database technology as Connection Cloud, a real-time data connection service infrastructure and all.
Oracle Monday put out its fiscal Q4 numbers three days early amid talk of a major management reorg and reports that long-time North American sales chief Keith Block was out. Seems he badmouthed Oracle’s “Exa” hardware business as “a dog” and “dead dead dead” and said Oracle co-president Mark Hurd not Larry Ellison should be CEO in instant messages exchanged last year with Oracle’s HR chief Anie Dodson. The IMs got out in a discovery dump last month by HP in connection with the ongoing HP v Oracle trial over Oracle’s refusal to continue to write software for Itanium. A hurried Oracle CFO Safra Catz said Oracle put the numbers out early so it could “speak more freely.” Guess she meant that otherwise it would be in a quiet period until Thursday evening. Presumably Oracle didn’t want to take more of a hit than the 2% it was off Monday on the gossip and give HP the satisfaction. Hurd said in a conference call that there’s no management reorg – well, at least there are no changes anywhere to speak of and no serious attrition – but Block is evidently toast. CNBC said so, which is more than you could divine from the call. His bio is still on the Oracle web site last we looked. To quiet things down the company said it will buy back up to $10 billion worth of its stock. Oracle’s performance in the May quarter was better-than-expected which pushed the stock up nearly 3% after-hours, making up for its Monday losses. Fiscal Q4 revenues were up 1% to $10.9 billion returning guidance-besting earnings per share of 82 cents (non-GAAP), up 10% to $4.1 billion. The company said earnings would have been a few cents higher if the dollar hadn’t gotten stronger. Ditto revenues. It was expected to return 78 cents on $10.89 billion. New software license revenues were up 7% to $4 billion. Software license updates and support revenues were up 5% to $4.2 billion. Despite reports of a $100 million contract Catz said the results weren’t dependent on any large deal. Hardware revenues were down 16% to $977 million, as widely expected. In a canned statement Hurd said, “Engineered systems business is now operating at well over a billion dollar revenue run rate. For the year, the Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, Sparc SuperCluster and the Oracle Big Data Appliance product group grew over 100% year-over-year.” Block apparently felt Hurd should be paying more attention to Oracle’s overseas business. However, all products and all geographies including a euro-tossed EMEA were up double-digits and Catz described systems growth rates as “amazing.” The Oracle crew expects its high-end “Exa” machines to pass IBM’s Power-based systems in revenue in FY 13. CEO Larry Ellison waded in with the statement that “The development of Oracle Cloud is strategic to increasing the size and profitability of Oracle’s software business. Our Oracle Cloud SaaS business is nearly at a billion-dollar revenue run rate, the same size as our engineered systems hardware business. The combination of engineered systems and the Oracle Cloud will drive Oracle’s growth in FY 2013.” Non-GAAP operating income was up 5% in the May quarter to $5.5 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 50%. Catz said new software licenses this quarter should grow 5%-15% in constant currency and total revenue should be up 3%-6% with EPS at 54 cents-58 cents.
Check out this really nice blog/tutorial on how to use Tiggzi to build a mobile app connected to cloud-based MongoDB, written by Ben Wen from MongoLab.
In our company it became a tradition to run an annual symposium on software development in New York City. This is a technical event with zero marketing, where our engineers are given an opportunity to share their experience gained while develping real-world applications.
HP Wednesday named Bill Veghte chief operating officer, a newly created position that relieves the former Windows executive of running the company’s poorly functioning software operation two years and three CEOs after he got the job. Veghte is keeping the corporate strategy charter he was given a few months ago as well as responsibility for Autonomy, HP’s great problematic British acquisition that he was given last week when Autonomy founder Mike Lynch was fired. HP doesn’t have much of a strategy, at least nothing that doesn’t resemble what everybody else is doing and that – as of last week – is to focus on Big Data, cloud and security – all of which depend on software.
Right before the long weekend Dell was supposed to be negotiating to buy Quest Software. Quest is looking for an offer better than the $2 billion Insight Venture Partners, the private equity house, bid in early March and Quest accepted barring a superior offer. Bloomberg says it knows from unnamed sources that Dell is among “several companies that made offers” during Quest’s so-called “go shop” period. And Quest has all but said it expected to get the superior offer it’s looking for. Whether that offer will come from Dell or from any of a handful of companies that could theoretically include HP, IBM, BMC, CA, Microsoft (Quest’s wares have a Microsoft bias) or Oracle is anybody’s guess. Insight offered $23 a share; JPMorgan Chase says it’s worth $28.
Whew! That loud sigh of relief you hear reverberating from Silicon Valley is a reaction to the June 1st Oracle-Google ruling, which declared that APIs are not protected by copyright. While this case could be far from over – Oracle may appeal and force another $50 million round of litigation – a knowledgeable judge and a well-argued 41-page decision will likely make for a strong precedent.
Oracle is walking away with next to nothing after spending two years and what is believed to be tens of million of dollars prosecuting Google and its Android operating system for patent and copyright infringement. US District Court Judge William Alsup, who has been responsible for the case since the beginning, including a six-week jury trial that ended last week, finally decided Thursday that the way Google used the structure, sequence and organization (SSO) of the 37 Java APIs Oracle asserted didn’t infringe copyright law.
The Datapower appliances support the use of the FTP protocols for message transport. The purpose of this article is to present number of common use case scenarios for FTP polling, illustrating correct configurations of the device to support the use case. The use case scenarios are as follows: 1- FTP Poller - polling files in one directory and transfer them to another directory 2- FTP Poller – polling files from FTP SERVER and forward them to another service 3- FTP Poller (sFTP – FTP over SSL) - polling files from FTP SERVER and forward them to another service 4- FTP Poller (sFTP – FTP over SSH) - polling files from FTP SERVER and forward them to another service
Do we need programming languages? You may think that the answer is no. But, if you go by the recent trend you may need to change your mind. Why is Google working two (GO, DART) new programming languages? Why has IBM (X10), Cray (Chapel) and Red Hat (Ceylon) working on creating a new programming language … Read more
In today’s economy everyone is trying to do more with less. Economic indicators tell us that manufacturing is beginning to pick up, but we’ve heard that before. Business analysts are predicting an upturn in overall business in the coming months. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in years. That’s all good news, but none of us are ready to return to the days of unmonitored spending or extravagant hiring practices. For many businesses, the largest asset after personnel is inventory. For many of those same businesses, potentially their largest expense after payroll is the cost of the inventory that sits on the warehouse floor. In the face of economic challenges some very smart people have developed various methods to help minimize the impact of assets tied up in unused inventory and wasted warehouse space. You’ve undoubtedly seen the acronyms and come across the names.
EMC is making servers to go in arrays so they can cuddle up to apps inside VMware virtual machines and reduce latency, an idea EMC’s had kicking around in varying degrees of discretion since last year. The Register saw two of them at EMC World in Vegas this week. It said one looked like a blade server with two in a 4U. The other looked like a 1U microserver and said it was given to understand the thing included a quad-core x85 chip, 1GB of RAM and a PCI SLIC I/O card. It imagines it “being mounted vertically to provide a very dense compute rack footprint.” Apparently CMO Jeremy Burton talked about “two rows of eight servers inside the array, 16 servers in total.”
After six days of deliberating, a federal jury Wednesday cleared Google and Android of infringing two Java-related patents now held by Oracle. The jury was then dismissed for good since it won’t be figuring out any damages Google might owe Oracle for treading on its copyrights. It may take another jury to decide if Android made so-called “fair use” of the IP. This one couldn’t, causing Google to move for a mistrial. Oracle wants significant damages connected with what Google’s making on Android.
Introduction The Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition beginning with version 5.0, supports JMX 1.2 and JMX Remote API 1.0, which is now the official JMX reference implementation. It includes significant monitoring and management features which can be divided into three broad categories.
The Verge and other outlets are reporting from the federal courtroom in San Francisco that a jury deliberating the patent-infringement phases of the Oracle-Google trial over Java has come back in favor of Google. The claim had concerned patents in Java that Oracle had accused Google of infringing when it created the Android operating system. [...]
JadeLiquid is pleased to announce the long-awaited release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 supporting 64-bit systems. WebRenderer 6.0 includes support for both 32 and 64-bit systems on Windows, OS X and Linux. SPARC Solaris is also a supported platform. The WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 release is the most advanced version of WebRenderer ever released. WebRenderer Swing Edition renders in lightweight Swing and is the only commercial strength Java browser SDK with this capability. New features found in the WebRenderer 6.0 include an updated Firefox engine, HTML5, SVG, Canvas, MathML and vastly improved font rendering. WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 also features much improved overall performance in the areas of JavaScript and rendering speed. The standard full-featured WebRenderer API is implemented and the W3C DOM and plugins such as Flash and PDFs are supported. One major enhancement built into WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 is support for older operating systems and Java versions.