Egnyte wants you to bury your file servers – their day is over – and now it claims you can throw your FTP servers into the hole too like they were grave goods to be discovered and wondered over by some next-century archeologist. In their place Egnyte (given the silly way we spell things you’re supposed to say ignite) proposes its HybridCloud, a next-generation storage, file-sharing and backup scheme originally targeted at SMBs that lately – at least in the last three quarters – has been attracting large accounts, including 30 departments in the Fortune 1000. It’s thought to resolve a psychological barrier to cloud adoption by reassuringly keeping copies of what’s in the cloud on-premise. That’s obviously why they call it HybridCloud. Companies aren’t supposed to feel they’re losing control of their data.
All in all I highly recommend this book as a learning resource for Java. It covers a ton of topics and covers them in detail with plenty of examples. I would expect to find this in any good Java programmer's library. I have had several Deitel books in the past and I would say my biggest disappointment with this one was finding out that there were no Deitel bugs to find on the cover. I have not had a Deitel book for a while and really enjoyed having one back in my hands. If you have never owned a Deitel book, you owe it to yourself to get one sometime. If you are a Java developer, or want to be a Java developer, I would recommend starting with this one. I am from the .NET camp and I am doing my best to go all out learning Java. This book has definitely helped with goal. This book covers a ton of information. Some of the topics covered Classes, Objects, Methods, Strings, Control Statements, Arrays, ArrayLists, Object-Oriented Programming, Exception Handling, GUI Components, Graphics, Java 2D, Regular Expressions, File Serialization, Streams, Object Serialization, Generic Collections, Generic Classes, Generic Methods, Applets, Java Web Start, Multithreading, Networking, Accessing Databases with JDBC, JavaServer Faces, Web Services, and UML.
Like evolution, constant technological change is unstoppable, whether through improvements or the emergence of entirely new technologies. This is especially true in the hosting industry where a new generation of more flexible and efficient platforms is emerging to take advantage of the cloud. Historically, hosting services have been very inflexible. For example, a customer looking to change out servers rented from a hosted service provider would have to wait for several days, sometimes resulting in a significant blow to credibility and other losses. Amazon, with its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution, was able to reduce that operation to minutes, yet still left most of the server administration tasks to users. Later, first generation platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, like Google AppEngine and Heroku, allowed developers to upload their application code to a preconfigured environment, but with a trade-off. Developers often had to rewrite code to run on the vendor’s platform and give up control of the execution environment.
Being new to Java I am interested in finding out the low-level nitty-gritty details of the Java HotSpot VM. This book was definitely the right choice for that. I must admit being a veteran .NET developer helped when digging into the different concepts and there are a ton of them. One of the things I really liked about the book is that although it leaned towards Oracle, it also included Windows and Solaris. There are 12 chapters. Chapter 1: Strategies, Approaches, and Methodologies, Chapter 2: Operating System Performance Monitoring, Chapter 3: JVM Overview, Chapter 4: JVM Performance Monitoring, Chapter 5: Java Application Profiling, Chapter 6: Java Application Profiling Tips and Tricks, Chapter 7: Tuning the JVM, Step by Step, Chapter 8: Benchmarking Java Applications, Chapter 9: Benchmarking Multitiered Applications, Chapter 10: Web Application Performance, Chapter 11: Web Services Performance, and Chapter 12: Java Persistence and Enterprise Java Beans Performance.
The interest in mobile applications started towards the end of last millennium! Since then, as the saying goes, lot of water has flown under the bridge. The technology scenario has changed beyond recognition. None of the platforms which are popular today was in existence when we started our mobile journey. In fact, if you look back, you will find that every three years there is a churn in among the popular platforms. One of the top 3 popular mobile platforms will lose out to an upstart and a new leader also emerges. Three Year Technology Churn Cycle Three years back we were still talking about 5 platforms (iPhone, RIM, Symbian, Windows and JME) apart from mobile web. Though iPhones had started becoming popular, features phones accounted for majority of the market. In the enterprise Blackberry (RIM) still ruled. Outside the US, Symbian based Nokia devices were by far the most popular devices. Android was still in the realm of emerging technologies with interesting possibilities but no market share. HTML5 was something that was expected to happen somewhere in the distant future. iPad simply did not exist!
Are you running an eCommerce site that relies on Third-Party Services such as Address-Validation, Credit Card Authorization or Mapping Services? Do you know how fast, reliable and accurate these service calls (free or charged) are for your web site? Do you know whether it has an impact on your end users in case one of these services is not available or returns wrong data? In last week's webinar Daniel Schrammel, IT System Manager at Leder und Schuh (responsible for sites such as www.shoemanic.com or www.jelloshoecompany.com), told his story on the impact of third-party online services to their business. One specific problem they had was with a service that validates shipping address information. If the entered shipping address is valid, users can opt for a "cash on delivery" option that is highly popular in the markets they sell to. If the address can't be validated or the service is unreachable, this convenient way of payment is not available and users have to go with credit card payment. As the eCommerce platform used to run their online stores also comes from a third-party provider, the Leder und Schuh IT team has no visibility into these third-party online service calls, whether they succeed and how that impacts end-user behavior.
Networks have become a strategic asset, the life blood of organizations. Once considered a “techy thing,” networks are now mission-critical for every member of the organization – from the IT manager to the marketing VP to the CEO. An increasing number of companies now recognize the impact network quality has on the customer experience and, in turn, on the bottom line. Providing a great customer experience, every time, is vital for limiting churn and building loyalty. This has led many organizations to adopt a strong quality assurance program to test and monitor all contact center services. This is particularly important in environments that must support multi-channel and multi-service applications. The complex configurations needed to enable voice, video and data to share network resources puts a tremendous strain on bandwidth and creates problems that can be very difficult to isolate. And the proliferation of mobile devices has added an entirely new set of issues and customer behaviors.
There’s a rather obscure JDeveloper bug that only effects IE7, for af:columns in af:tables that show af:outputText fields based on dates that are null (phew, try and say that with a mouth full of wheaties). It occurs in 11.1.1.4.0 and 11.1.2.0.0 (and all versions in between it’s assumed). In the previous picture from IE7 if you look closely, you’ll notice that the HireDate2 column has lost its border for the null entries. Note the other columns even when they are null, still have a border. If we look under IE8 (or any other browser for that matter) we see the problem doesn’t occur at all:
Birst figures it’s scored an industry first by making its cloud-based Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) SDK available for the Apple iPad. The new iOS SDK lets developers embed highly interactive and visual Birst-powered business analytics in their native iPad apps. Taking advantage of the iPad’s gesture-based interface, they can build mobile applications that filter information of interest and drill into details on both charts and report tables. The widgetry saves developers from having to concentrate on the plumbing, such as the data warehouse, data integration, data quality and core BI engine, and lets them focus on building business intelligence into their applications. By writing to Birst’s Mobile APIs, the company says they can bypass the complicated data integration, quality and consolidation issues that underpin BI implementations.
A couple of months late, as is its time-honored fashion, AMD Monday wheeled out its 16-core Interlagos server chip, based on its new long-awaited Bulldozer architecture and formally christened it the Opteron 6200. There’s also the Valencia, a smaller low-power eight-core chip now officially designated the Opteron 4200. It’s got them pointed at virtualization, the cloud and HPC hoping to revisit the market share gains and margin expansion it experienced years ago with its first Opterons before the ill-fated Barcelona crushed its lead. On a good day it currently holds about 5% of the market but it’s hoping to make a bigger dent in emerging markets like China.
Boundary, a real-time network monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) start-up that’s been pretty sub rosa since it got organized last year, surfaced Tuesday sporting a Big Data analytics platform as well that’s supposed to do what Hadoop and Cassandra do but a thousand to tens of thousands times faster. The company was started by CEO Benjamin Black, who was engineering director at Microsoft Windows Live involved in building one of the largest content delivery networks in the world and co-authored the first documents on what would become EC2 as principal engineer for Amazon infrastructure. He also led the design and implementation of new layer 3 network for Amazon’s production network. Boundary’s been operating since January on $4.1 million of Black and LightSpeed Venture Partners’ money spent in part apparently on Boundary’s own infrastructure. Its widgetry, currently in beta, works with public clouds like EC2, of course, and private clouds and across physical and virtual systems.
Activist investor Relational Investors LLC has reportedly taken a ~1% position in Hewlett-Packard and its co-founder Ralph Whitworth has gotten a seat on the inimitably dysfunctional HP board. His appointment will raise the number of seats to 14. According to Bloomberg Whitworth took advantage of the precipitous plunge in HP’s stock price on August 18 when former HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced that HP was buying Autonomy for close to $10.3 billion, abandoning webOS devices and might dump its PC business, a move it nixed last month. Apparently he kept buying through September. He will reportedly join the board’s compensation committee and its finance and investment committee. Bloomberg says it contacted HP CEO Meg Whitman and chairman Ray Lane last month and told them “he’d bring credibility and focus Hewlett-Packard on using its cash to buy back shares, increase its dividend or put more money into research and development.” Apparently they folded like a house of cards a few weeks later.
Now that it’s decided to keep its PC arm HP has unveiled its first Apple MacBook-aping metal-encased Ultrabook laptop, targeted at the business user and positioned as “designed to bridge the gap between professional and personal life.” God willing it’ll deliver a highly competitive nine hours of battery life. The skinny Core i5-based 3.3lb Folio measures less than 18 millimeters deep and is fitted with a 13.3-inch HD BrightView display. It features Intel’s Rapid Start Technology, a backlit keyboard for low-light conditions and a 128GB solid-state drive. HP has fitted one model out with a TPM Embedded Security Chip that protects e-mail data as well as information on the hard drive. There’s a dock too. And it comes with Windows 7 and 4 gigs of memory.
Collabnet has hoisted its ScrumWorks Pro Agile project management tool into its Codesion public cloud development platform and made it on-demand. It says developers can now “code, connect and deploy” software on an enterprise-grade platform backed by 24/7 support, uptime SLAs and integrations with the usual development solutions and both public and private cloud production environments. Figure Amazon, Google App Engine, Force.com and Joyent. CollabNet supplies ScrumWorks for use on-prem but the company’s cloud proposition is richer. Users also get tools like Apache Subversion, Git, Trac, Bugzilla and CollabNet’s Agile ALM platform TeamForge plus the cloud’s backup, visibility, tracking and provisioning.
Amazon Web Services wants to move further up-market and service more of the HPC crowd so it’s publicly beta testing a Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (CC2), its biggest, most powerful cloud service to date. The thing has 16 Xeon cores (a pair of eights with Hyper-Threading enabled), 60.5GB of RAM, 3.37TB of storage and 10 gigabit Ethernet for cluster communication. Users can have it with Linux or Windows Server 2008 R2. It costs $2.40 an hour per instance or $4,146 for a reserved instance on a one-year contract. Cheaper pricing might be had on the EC2 Spot Market. An array of 290 CC2 instances good for 63.07 teraFLOPS would run $1,000 an hour. Amazon fashioned a Linux cluster of 17,024 cores (1,064 instances) that ranked 42 on the latest Top 500 list just out. It hit 240.09 teraFLOPS.
General Electric must have gotten the memo from McKinsey’s research arm calling Big Data the “next frontier” and promising untold riches to those who unlock its secrets. The company is going to pour a reported billion dollars over the next three years into a new global software headquarters that it’s moving into San Ramone in San Francisco’s East Bay where it will build the “Industrial Internet,” a sub-category of the Internet of Things and create intelligent connect systems to harness Big Data. It means to hire 400 more software architects, engineers, biz dev and user experience people, presumably folks who don’t want to cross the bridge to Silicon Valley proper.
JRE 6 was released in 2006, five years after a major JRE version was released. For the past few years Java was looking stagnant, and many Java developers began to worry; this concern was amplified when Oracle purchased Sun. We will try to discover if there's a big refactoring or maybe many features were added that can explain the time span between these two releases. In this first part we will focus on design and implementation changes, and the second part will focus on added features and breaking changes. With JavaDepend we can compare two versions and detect any modifications concerning architecture, design or implementation. We can provide a summary of the changes using the following views.
Now, using the next-generation platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering Jelastic, it is possible to build and run any Java application in the cloud instead of from a personal computer -- speeding development time and maximizing computing resources. Jelastic allows developers to make code changes and rebuild applications in the cloud, removing the lag time caused whenever files are updated and uploaded from a personal computer. Jelastic can take application source code directly from version control repositories, via either the Git or SVN protocol. Using Jelastic, developers can easily swap test and production environments with simple point-and-click. The same is true for cloning an exact copy to test or prepare an application for production deployment. Jelastic is fully compatible with existing Java applications and libraries.
HTML5 is a draft specification for the next major iteration of HTML. It represents a break from its predecessors, HTML4 and XHTML. Some elements have been removed and it is no longer based on SGML, an older standard for document markup. HTML5 also has more allowances for incorrect syntax than were present in HTML4. It has rules for parsing to allow different browsers to display the same incorrectly formatted document in the same fashion. There are many notable additions to HTML, such as native drawing support and audiovisual elements. In this excerpt, we discuss the features added by HTML5 and the associated JavaScript APIs.
You don’t agree with that? Have you ever looked at the details of your page load time and analyzed what really impacts Page Load Time? Let me show you with a real life example and let me explain that in most cases you only control 1/3 of the time required to load a page as the rest is consumed by third-party content that you do not have under control. When analyzing web page load times we can use tools such as dynaTrace, Firebug or PageSpeed. The following two screenshots show timeline views from dynaTrace AJAX Edition. The timelines show all network downloads, rendering activities and JavaScript executions that happen when loading almost exactly the same page. The question is: Where does the huge difference come from?
Most Java performance opportunities fall into one or more of the following categories: Using a more efficient algorithm. The largest gains in the performance of an application come from the use of a more efficient algorithm. The use of a more efficient algorithm allows an application to execute with fewer CPU instructions, also known as a shorter path length. An application that executes with a shorter path length generally executes faster. Many different changes can lead to a shorter path length. At the highest level of the application, using a different data structure or modifying its implementation can lead to a shorter path length. Many applications that suffer application performance issues often use inappropriate data structures. There is no substitute for choosing the proper data structure and algorithm. As profiles are analyzed, take notice of the data structures and the algorithms used. Optimal performance can be realized when the best data structures and algorithms are utilized.
Jelastic Inc., the company behind the next-generation Java hosting platform Jelastic, has announced that it has been incorporated in the U.S. and has established operations in Palo Alto, Calif. Jelastic is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that runs any Java application in the cloud without code changes. “We are seeing tremendous interest in the U.S. following our announcement last month of beta availability with our first U.S. hosting partner, ServInt,” said Ruslan Synytsky, CEO, Jelastic. “Our base in the U.S. helps us work closely with developers and hosting providers. We expect rapid growth as Jelastic is the only platform that makes it easy to run Java code from the cloud without vendor lock-in.”
Project management software provider Project Insight announces the release of version 9.3. The focus of this software update was to make Project Insight more customizable while maintaining the same high level ease of use. Project Insight is a mid-market online project management software that allows experienced project managers and new team members to access real time project data from any supported browser. Project Insight version 9.3 includes over 20 new features and fixes. All new additions to the project software enhance the navigation experience for the end user. For example, project managers may add team members as resources to a project directly from the project add/edit form, reducing the number of clicks when initiating a project in the software.
This morning ZD Net published an article stating the Adobe will cease development of Flash Player on Mobile in favor of packaging mobile applications in Adobe AIR. The Flash Player haters quickly picked up this news and to draw attention to their blogs/tabloids started to cash on Steve Job’s name starting that he won the battle with Adobe since Steve was the one who didn’t let Flash Player on iOS. As of now, I don’t know if these rumors are valid, but even if they are, this ain’t breaking news. Let me explain why in three simple sentences.
Cloudability has gone to open beta with its widgetry for tracking cloud costs. It says it can follow and analyze a user’s complete cloud spend across 80 cloud and application providers and across multiple vendors. The mix includes Amazon, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Google and Heroku. Cloudability claims over 350 companies are already actively using the service through its closed beta version. That apparently works out to more than $10 million in cloud spend. It describes the calculator as “a new layer of the cloud stack.” It’s supposed to suggest ways cloud users can increase the efficiency of their cloud use and provide actionable insight into unnecessary overages and unused instances. It claims its private beta identified an average of $2,000 in efficiency gains per customer.