Dell has made its first serious cloud move and gone into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) business using VMware’s multi-tenant virtualized vCloud Datacenter Services environment hosted in a Dell data center. It’ll provide vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls and catalog capabilities. The widgetry, called simply Dell Cloud, is still in closed beta with a half-dozen customers ahead of expected rollout in the fourth quarter in the US and next year in EMEA and Asia Pacific-Japan. There should be a public beta in September. It’s just a first IaaS move. Dell means to add Azure and OpenStack next year. (Remember earlier this year when Dell said it would put a billion dollars into new data centers?)
The federal judge who oversaw the high-profile trial of SAP last year that ended with the jury awarding Oracle a record $1.3 billion in damages has overturned the decision, agreeing with the German company that the amount is "grossly excessive" and "contrary to the weight of evidence." She lowered the award to $272 million - all she said that Oracle had proven at trial - and told SAP it would get a new trial just on damages if Oracle didn't accept that amount. Looks like it'll be back to court then, your honor. Oracle - as you might expect - issued a statement saying, "There was voluminous evidence regarding the massive scope of the theft, clear involvement of SAP management in the misconduct and the tremendous value of the IP stolen. We believe the jury got it right and we intend to pursue the full measure of damages that we believe are owed to Oracle."
It appears from a WikiLeaks diplomatic cable drop that the US lobbied the European Commission to clear Oracle’s $7.4 million acquisition of Sun and all its satellites. Oracle apparently told the US, and the US apparently relayed the message that Oracle wouldn’t divest MySQL, a condition that would “destroy” the deal, and if Oracle didn’t buy Sun, Sun would go belly up. One of Oracle’s stated reasons for holding on to MySQL was to avoid a huge loss on a property that Sun had overpaid a billion dollars for and Oracle couldn’t unload for anywhere near that price. Deputy chief of the US Mission to the European Union Ambassador Christopher Murray wrote home saying, “The Department of Justice/Antitrust views this matter as a high priority. Its senior officials and investigative staff are currently engaging productively and intensely with their DG Comp [Directorate General for Competition] counterparts and are in close touch with Oracle and Sun in the hopes of preventing a divergent outcome.”
IBM is buying Algorithmics, the Toronto-based risk analytics firm, for $387 million cash. Its services are used by 350 banks, investment and insurance businesses such as Allianz, HSBC, Nomura and Société Générale. The money will go to the Fitch Group, the credit ratings agency majority owned by Fimalac, the Paris holding company. The acquisition will add 900 people to IBM’s Software Group. Blue’s business analytics and optimization team, the result of $14 billion spent on 25 acquisitions the last five years, currently has more than 8,000 consultants including 200 mathematicians with more than 500 patents.
Back in the seventies, I’d been taking entry exams to the Kiev Politechnic Institute (KPI). I lived in the Ukraine, which was a part of the Soviet Union. At that time people of Jewish descent had a really hard time getting into most of the colleges and universities. Typically, there were four entry exams for the engineering majors: the verbal math, the written math, the verbal physics, and essay. There were no such things as multiple choice tests – we had to solve problems. Being a Jewish boy myself, I was raised knowing that getting into college would be extremely difficult for me, and I had to be much better prepared than regular Ukrainian and Russian kids. I was strong in math (can’t say this about the physics though).
Oracle and Google may not get to go at each come Halloween depriving onlookers of a real treat. District Court Judge William Alsup told the pair Monday that the trial may have to be postponed. It all depends on whether a “large criminal” trial starts, as scheduled, on October 17. If it doesn’t then Oracle v Google will pick a jury on October 19 and the trial will start October 31. Then on Tuesday the judge said there were going to be two Java trials: one on liability, one on damages and that he’s appointed Brigham Young University professor of economics James R. Kearl as an independent damages expert.
This is another section that is broader than one would first imagine. There’s a reason that many large organizations employ dedicated database administrators. That said, this doesn’t prevent the average sysadmin from making some changes to enhance performance on their database. The easiest way to start on this is to utilize a script to automatically check your configuration options and make suggestions based on status variables MySQL sets. I’ve had good luck with a script called mysqltuner.pl. You can visit the project page at GitHub here: https://github.com/rackerhacker/MySQLTuner-perl. This script can be conveniently pulled with: wget mysqltuner.pl
The case for using developer testing as one mechanism for improving software quality.
VMTurbo, the two-year-old start-up doing application performance-directed intelligent workload management software, has hired former Citrix Xen Products Group general manager Louis Shipley as president and CEO. He replaces VMTurbo founder Shmuel Kliger, who will now focus on product and technology strategy as well as strategic partnerships. The outfit claims thousands of organizations worldwide, including British Telecom, NASA and Colgate-Palmolive, are using its year-old widgetry. It’s supposed to deliver Quality of Service (QoS) for virtualized mission-critical apps, using an economic scheduling engine to dynamically adjust resource allocation to meet business goals. Shipley has done the CEO gig a couple of times before. VMTurbo is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
VMware’s got a beta of its promised Micro Cloud Foundry, a Mac or PC laptop version of its open PaaS for building and testing end-to-end cloud applications locally. It’s out as a free download and available as a downloadable VM image. It’s supposed to save on configuring middleware without sacrificing scalability. It runs in a local virtual machine and offers a choice of frameworks, application infrastructure services and clouds in which to deploy applications. The widgetry supports Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails and Sinatra, Node.js, Grails and other JVM-based frameworks including Scala Lift, MongoDB, MySQL and Redis application services. VMware vFabric services are coming.
SYS-CON Events announced today that UShareSoft, a provider of a self-service cloud factory for virtual and cloud-ready software images, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 9th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 7–10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. UShareSoft simplifies application migration and software governance for the cloud. UShareSoft's UForge Appliance Factory enables "build-to-order" software delivery by automating the creation, maintenance and deployment of software appliances and image templates on any OS for any cloud, virtual or physical format. UShareSoft tools are helping hosting providers, ISVs and enterprises in their transition phase to the cloud.
There is now a new Amazon web service called ElastiCache meant to put users closer to frequently accessed data and maybe ward off some Amazon competition. It’s supposed to make it easy to deploy, operate and scale an in-memory cache for any web application running in Amazon’s cloud, reportedly granting Amazon customers one of their most fervent wishes, and replacing what AWS CTO Werner Vogels calls homegrown “operational muck.” It improves the performance of web applications by retrieving data from a fast, managed, in-memory cloud caching system instead of relying on slow disk-based databases.
Microsoft turned up Monday in Beijing with a cloud pact with leading Chinese Linux provider China Standard Software Co Ltd (CS2C). They’re supposed to co-develop, co-market and sell “mixed-source” solutions to the Chinese public and private cloud market. The widgetry will be built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V cloud architecture and include support for CS2C’s NeoKylin Linux Server products. A customer legal covenant agreement goes with it. What exactly that means wasn’t disclosed nor were any terms. The pair also pledged to sponsor a joint virtual technology lab in Beijing for solution development and testing of cloud solutions, which is supposed to enable customers to move to virtualization and a cloud-based IT infrastructure. It will focus on the certification of NeoKylin on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, creating Microsoft Systems Center management packs for NeoKylin application workloads, and incorporating support for NeoKylin in Hyper-V.
HP’s webOS chief Stephen DeWitt, a month in the job, told the AllThingsD blog Monday that the company still means to ship webOS on all its PCs and printers next year, which was its intention months ago before it killed off its app-starved webOS devices and decided it wanted out of the PC biz. Bloomberg, citing no sources, says the opposite. HP is supposedly entertaining some potentially large volume webOS licensing deals now that HP has pulled the plug on its webOS tablets and smartphones but apparently it doesn’t know whether to license the software to other device makers, partner with a single company, focus on non-device uses, or something else.
I don’t like most of the Flex MVC frameworks cause they force me to write more code. I do like frameworks and tools that let me write less code. But there is no free lunch and, at some point, even productive frameworks, tools, and libraries reach critical mass and the finger pointing game begins. Today, I’ve been working on an application that was supposed to display a list of orders form a relational DBMS. Not a rocket science. But let’s go over the languages, libraries, tools, and frameworks I had to use for this.
I will be in Vienna, Austria, September 7-9 teaching a 2-day JSF, RichFaces workshop, plus presenting 2 sessions at one-day conference. The workshop and the conference are co-sponsored by Objective and UNIQA. The first two days are dedicated to hands-on JSF and RichFaces workshop. This is a great opportunity to learn everything you need to build rich enterprise applications with JSF and RichFaces.
JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology is used for developing server-side user interfaces (UI) for Java EE applications. JSF 2.0 architecture has introduced several new features, most of which we shall discuss in this article. The salient new features in JSF 2.0 are State Saving, Facelets, Navigation, Validations, Scopes, AJAX, Resource Handling, Composite Components, View Params, Client Behaviors, Event Handling, and Exception Handling. In JSF 1.2 the full component tree is saved/restored. Attributes are also stored and restored. Saving and restoring the full state has performance and memory issues as the complete state has to be saved and restored and the size of the state saved could be large. In JSF 1.2 each UIComponent saves/restores its own state in the component hierarchy using saveState and resoreState methods in StateHolder. If state saving were to be optimized, it would have to be added to each component class in the hierarchy.
In a move that could cut into aspirin sales, Xsigo Systems has developed a virtualized Server Fabric meant to save a whole lot of people a whole lot of screwing around mapping paths, assigning IP addresses, configuring switches, switch ports and VLANs and pulling cables just to connect a virtual machine to some network resource. See, it does in a click what can take days doing by hand and enables end-to-end network connections from VMs to servers, networks, storage and other VMs by virtue of a private virtual interconnect. The widgetry is advertised as “the industry’s first fully virtualized infrastructure for cloud-optimized data centers.”
The “cloud era” of information technology is upon us. Connectivity is pervasive and everyone and everything is connected. Readily available, low-cost, Internet-based services providing access to new capabilities and infinite amounts of information have given rise to a new set of experiences and expectations for technology users. Furthermore, a new generation is entering the workforce, one that has grown up with technology at their fingertips, one that expects immediate gratification and instant results and one that is ambivalent to traditional IT controls. These tech-savvy business users are mixing the technology experiences from their consumer lives with those of their profession to morph into a new “prosumer” workforce. And they are able to drive game-changing innovation without a dependence on IT intervention. This is the reality of the cloud computing economy; it’s the forcing function behind the creation of new goods and services, new business models, new routes to market, and new ways of engaging customers. Simply put, cloud services are the enablers for the next frontier in business and government, one where technology-enabled services are easily sourced and woven into the enterprise fabric. However, cloud sourcing can also introduce new levels of complexity and business risk without the appropriate levels of integration and governance. This has given rise to a new class of service provider – the cloud service broker.
Nimbula, the start-up put in train by the team that developed EC2, has updated its so-called cloud operating system – at some point we must debate what exactly a cloud operating system is and if that’s what Nimbula really is – meanwhile it’s, um, still kinda hazy what all Nimbula actually supports and who’s supporting what – but the outfit says Director 1.5 is now capable of supporting a geographically distributed cloud and calls it an industry first. The software is supposed to manage the many geographic locations of a multi-site cloud from a single view. It’s supposed to improve the cloud experience for users since they can access any resource worldwide with a single login and deploy their workloads to any of the sites in a self-service manner.
After shedding its stealth cocoon back in the spring when it announced it got a $13.2 million A round, two-year-old Nutanix finally launched its Google-like Complete Cluster on Tuesday. It’s supposed to make virtualization simple and cheap. The thing is a modular plug-and-play building block appliance that puts storage and compute in the same box so virtualized data centers can be built without a SAN or NAS just like Google has been doing all these years. The start-up says that aside from contributing pain-in-the-neck complexity and pricey overhead to whatever it touches, pre-Internet SANs, or for that matter NAS, are dated, monolithic, slow, inelastic, undistributed, frazzled by virtualization and a bitch to manage. They’re also a habitual bottleneck and an impediment to private clouds.
Tiggr is a Web-based IDE for building mobile Web and native apps. Today I’d like to give you 15 reasons why this new-of-a-kind IDE deserves your attention. 1. Mobile Apps IDE in the Cloud – Access Your App Anytime, Anywhere Tiggr is a mobile apps IDE in the cloud. There is nothing to download. You can work on your app anytime, anywhere. Such a Web-based IDE has been every developer’s “dream” for a long time. 2. Build with jQuery Mobile Components Prototype and build the UI with popular jQuery Mobile components. jQuery Mobile is a cross-platform and cross-device mobile framework. It has already been tested to work on many many devices and platforms, so you don’t have to do it.
JSF is the standard UI technology in Java EE, but on its own, it lacks tools for effectively building real-world rich enterprise applications. RichFaces 4, an open source extension for JSF, fills this development gap. RichFaces Core provides major enhancements for Ajax request customization, rendering and execution options, the JSF client queue, and more. RichFaces UI provides a large number of rich out-of-the-box components. RichFaces Skins makes it possible to change the look and feel of entire applications on the fly. The RichFacesComponent Development Kit streamlines building custom components.
There are very few pieces of software where a casual approach can be taken to the process of software development. Software development is intrinsically a difficult process, gathering requirements, design, development and testing all taking large effort. In reaction enterprises have setup and adopted strict development processes to build software (or at least the successful enterprises have ;-).
ADF and JDeveloper are sold as productivity boosters for developers. Yet in the end they are just a technology platform. By themselves they don't solve the complexities of software development process as a whole (though they do make parts of it easier).
ADF and JDeveloper are sold as productivity boosters for developers. Yet in the end they are just a technology platform. By themselves they don't solve the complexities of software development process as a whole (though they do make parts of it easier).
This leaves IT departments struggling, as they might like the potential of ADF as a platform, but they intrinsically know there's more to software development, there's the process of development to consider. How will the tasks of requirement gathering, design, development & testing be applied to ADF? And more importantly how to shortcut the process of establishing these for ADF within the enterprise? There's a need to bring the two concepts together, the technology & the process, to help the adoption of ADF in the enterprise.
As ADF matures we're slowly seeing more books on Oracle's strategic JSF based web framework. Up to now the books have focused on the holistic understanding of the technical framework, the tricky & expert level implementation, or more recently the speed of development. Sten Vesterli's Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple is the first to apply the processes and methodologies of design and development to ADF.
Of particular delight Sten's book starts out by suggesting building a proof of concept to skill up teams in ADF, to learn the complexities, & gather empirical evidence of the effort required. From here a focus on estimation and considerations of team structure are raised, all valuable stuff for the enterprise trying to control the tricky process of software development.
In order to make use of reuse, the next few chapters focus on the infrastructure and ADF constructs that need to be setup before a real project commences, including page templates, ADF BC framework classes and more. This is the stuff you wish you'd been told to create first if you forged ahead in building with ADF without any guidance.
Then chapter by chapter the tasks of building, adding security, internalization and other development efforts are covered. There's even a chapter on using JMeter to stress test your ADF app (with a link back to my blog! Thanks Sten).
As can be seen from the topics, there's relatively little consideration of actually implementing ADF Business Components or ADF Faces RC. As such it must be said reading this book won't make you an expert in the technical side of ADF, but rather will address how you can take a sensible approach to the overall development process.
All in all Sten Vesterli's Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple is another valuable book in my ADF bookshelf and a recommended read for enterprise specialists looking at adopting ADF into their organisation.
Disclaimer: I know Sten personally and in addition Packt Publishing has provided me Sten's book for free to review.
JadeLiquid is pleased to announce the long-awaited beta release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 supporting 64bit systems. The beta of WebRenderer 6.0 includes support for both 32 and 64bit systems on Windows, OSX and Linux (other platforms to follow). The 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 beta include an updated Firefox engine, SVG support and overall performance improvements in the areas of rendering and JavaScript. The standard WebRenderer API is implemented and support for the W3C DOM and plugins such as Flash and PDFs are standard. The release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 beta demonstrates JadeLiquid's ongoing commitment to provide the best commercial solution for displaying web content within Java applications. Since the first release WebRenderer in early 2003, WebRenderer has continued to break new ground in the Java browser SDK market. With millions of deployments world wide, WebRenderer provides commercially robust web content display in Java applications. WebRenderer has the widest platform support of any commercial Java browser SDK including Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris and AIX.