All in all I think this a great book. It will be on my desk for the next few years until I need to replace it with the 8th or 9th version. This book has delivered exactly what I was hoping for, an in-depth look into modern day JavaScript. I rarely use JavaScript nowadays in my day to day job. I have been lucky to avoid the messy browser applications it is usually a part of the past few years. That was my primary reason for buying the book. Although I may not like it, JavaScript is here to stay, and I need to keep current with it.
The recent spike in insider threats, coupled with a rise in compliance considerations, has forced organizations to ensure only authorized users access sensitive application functionality and data. Historically, user entitlements or authorization logic has been embedded inside an application. For example, if the user of an application meets specific conditions, such as a specific role, access to that application function will be granted at runtime. But if the definition of specific authorization conditions changes over time, then the application developer needs to modify the application’s source code, test, and re-deploy the application. Suppose a homegrown portal application must present a sensitive piece of customer information such as a Social Security Number (SSN) when a service representative views a customer’s profile. It is determined that in order to ensure compliance with various privacy regulations, only directors and senior managers may be able to view a customer’s SSN. A decision has to be dynamically made whenever the application must show an SSN as to whether the current user may view the actual data or some default value (e.g., “XXX-XX-XXXX”). The decision must take into account the user’s job title. A dozen parts of the application that can display a customer’s SSN mean a dozen places for this business logic to be applied.
This was an interesting bug… I was working on a Web application, where Adobe Flex client was sending an instance of an ActionScript WrapperObject to the Java server, which was supposed to invoke some JBDC code to run an SQL Insert statement saving the data from the Java version of WrapperObject in the database. I wrote all the pieces of Flex, Java, and SQL and started Tomcat in Eclipse IDE. The Web browser displayed my window, I filled out the form populating the ActionScript WrapperObject and pressed the button Save. Nothing happened. No errors and no data inserted in the database.
Cloud computing has now passed the stage of hype to reality. More and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of remote hosting of IT services rather than local IT management, especially as managing and operating IT networks and services is not getting any easier. Managing IT networks requires a broad set of competencies in a growing number of technologies and products. It therefore makes sense that these competencies are centralized in larger data centers providing cloud services to a number of smaller enterprises for which IT is not a core competency. Larger data centers also means larger installations with higher-speed interfaces as well as an obligation to maintain service availability. This requires extensive test and management capabilities to ensure service “up-time.” However, will test and management of cloud services differ from how they are performed today? What are the special challenges that cloud service providers face in this regard?
Google last week lost its shot at getting the Android trial delayed while the Patent and Trademark Office re-examines Oracle’s Java patents. Presiding judge William Alsup said the trial is still on for Halloween. Google did get its Daubert hearing. The judge told Oracle to find a new theory and bring its claims of $2.6 billion or $6 billion or whatever it is within the realm of reality. The judge outlined a possible alternative approach that starts at $100 million, chump change by Oracle standards even with trebling, leaving Florian Mueller – who’s been following the case wall-to-wall and making some pretty mind reading-style guesses about what comes next – to conclude that Oracle’s best big money bet lies in getting Android enjoined so it can negotiate a big fat per-unit royalty from Google.
Oracle is going to get the face time with Google CEO Larry Page that it wanted. Page has been ordered to sit still and answer Oracle’s questions about those Java licensing talks Google had with Sun during a two-hour deposition. Oracle is supposed to limit its questions to “topics relevant to the willfulness of defendant’s alleged patent infringement, and the value of Android” to Google. Google said last week that it rejected Sun’s proposal that Google pay $100 million in royalties to use Java in Android. A Google lawyer described the offer as a co-development deal, rather than a patent license despite an internal e-mail written by Android founder Andy Rubin saying Google needed a Java license.
CloudBees, the Java PaaS start-up founded by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey, has gotten a $10.5 million B round eight months after its $4 million A round that had JBoss founder Marc Fleury take a piece of the action. The new round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with the participation of existing backer Matrix Partners. CloudBees only launched in November with a platform for developing, running and managing enterprise Java apps in the cloud. The widgetry currently includes DEV@cloud, a service that lets developers take their build and test environments to the cloud, and RUN@cloud, which lets them deploy those apps to production on the cloud.
On January 25, 2011 the overthrow of the Egyptian government began – quietly at first, with non-violent demonstrations of long-held grievances. But, by February 11 Mubarak had resigned, the government of a long-stable country had been overturned and the future of the entire region was altered forever. With the overwhelming amount of web content and social media we are compelled to ask: “could we have seen this coming?” Yes, is the answer – provided we’re willing to look at information in a new way. To a person analyzing “big data,” this means that we must include the broadest range of data available. Increasingly, social media and other web-based content represent a rich source of timely information and would be very useful to a broader understanding of people, events, organizations, etc. However, these new data sources come with complications like volume, validity, and understanding in context. We decided to explore this issue in more detail. We wanted to find out what connections could be uncovered when the data came from social media and web content.
Apparently tablets and smartphones haven’t driven a stake though the PC’s heart quite yet. Although Q2 is seasonally its nadir, Intel came in with another one of those record-breaking quarters Wednesday. Its revenues were up 21% to $13 billion, net income up 2% to $3 billion, EPS up 6% to 54 cents, and its gross margin was 61%, down 6.6% from last year when it was uncharacteristically high. Wall Street figured it would do 51 cents on $12.83 billion. Since Intel’s EPS was 59 cents before items it really crushed that expectation. It said it saw double-digit revenue growth across all business segments – even PCs.
Google told the court considering whether the Oracle-Google Android suit should be stayed that it’s willing to settle. That’s like the next best thing to admitting that it’s guilty of infringing the Java patents that now belong to Oracle and could lose the case, something the judge has already sussed out. Google made the suggestion in a joint filing despite the Patent and Trademark Office’s preliminary finding against a couple of the Oracle patents. Google’s trying to get the trial stayed pending a re-examination of all the patents, but is arguing for at least a narrowing of the case “for the sake of efficiency,” it said: “Such a narrowed case will also eliminate the need for those efforts specifically directed at the claims rejected through re-examination, including motion practice, expert reports, and other trial preparation, as well as make it more likely that the parties could reach an informal resolution of the matter.” (Emphasis added.)
I’ve been recently involved helping a new European start-up just launched a new Platform-as-a-Service capable of running and automatically scaling any Java application. Here’s a quick write-up on why I think Jelastic is really onto something, a service to try and a company to watch. Say, you’ve got a great Java application which you want to put on the internet and make it available to the world. Believe it or not, up until today, what sounds like a trivial task simply could not be done. You effectively had to choose between lack of scalability, necessity to manually set up and maintain the whole software stack, requirement to re-write your code to conform to a particular framework (and get locked into it thereafter), or a combination of the above.
Developing your Software as a Service (SaaS) takes you away from the dark ages of programming and into the new age in which copyright protection, DMA, and pirating don’t exist. In the current age of computing, people don’t expect to pay for software but instead prefer to pay for the support and other services that come with it. When was the last time anyone paid for a web browser? With the advent of Open Source applications, the majority of paid software is moving to hosted systems which rely less on the users’ physical machines. This means you don’t need to support more hardware and other software that may conflict with your software, for example, permissions, firewalls, and antivirus software. Instead of developing a simple desktop application that you need to defend and protect against pirating and cloning, you can develop your software as a service; releasing updates and new content seamlessly while charging your users on a monthly basis. With this method, you can charge your customers a small monthly fee instead of making them pay a large amount for the program upfront, and you can make more money in the long run. For example, many people pirate Microsoft Office instead of shelling out $300 upfront for a legal copy, whereas if it were offered software online in a format such as Google Docs, those same people might gladly pay $12.50 a month for the service. Not only do they get a web-based version that they can use on any computer, but everything they save is stored online and backed up. After two years of that user paying for your service, you’ve made as much money from that client as the desktop version, plus you’re ensuring that they’ll stay with you as long as they want to have access to those documents. However, if your users use the software for a month and decide they don’t like it, they don’t need to continue the subscription, and they have lost only a small amount of money. If you offer a trial-based subscription, users can test your software at no cost, which means they’re more likely to sign up.
When I learned Ruby on Rails, I was first and foremost impressed with ActiveRecord. For those who do not know ActiveRecord, it is a Ruby on Rails’ ORM layer, which is an equivalent to Hibernate in Java. However, ActiveRecord is easier to work with because it is based on conventions rather than configuration, and also it configures itselt at start time based on structure of data in the database. I was so impressed with ActiveRecord, that I was sure someone would implement it in Java, but after waiting a couple of years, I put a stop to wait and implemented it myself (with help of a few friends).
If you watch the news regularly, it is easy to notice that in almost any given week some company seems to have experienced an electronic break-in or in some other way experienced a form of computer or network compromise. While computer security professionals can help to mitigate such risks via the proper configuration of firewalls, careful crafting of Access Control Lists, the application of updates, and the judicious application of file permission, among other measures, it’s important that one of the most fundamental ways of improving the security of a computer or network resource not be overlooked – that of a really strong password. To this day passwords remain one of the weaker links in the security of electronic resources, and their potential for exploitation needs to be examined more carefully than ever. With the growing trend of cloud computing-based initiatives, many resources that were formerly enclosed within the wall of a business are now available over a network, thereby mitigating the physical security measures the previously helped to limit access to such resources. Given that many of these cloud-based solutions are accessed via user name and password combinations, a strong password is often the primary form of defense against illicit access.
Jaspersoft, the open source BI house, has gotten $11 million in new “strategic” capital financing. It’s coming from existing investors Red Hat, SAP Ventures and new investor Quest Software, along with the participation of all its existing major investors including Doll Capital Management, Morgenthaler Ventures, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners and Adams Street Partners. Jaspersoft’s already seen at least $32.5 million, with the last VC infusion maybe being a $12.5 million E round; it never did say. The money is evidently supposed fuel its “aggressive” product roadmap, global expansion and potential strategic acquisitions.
US antitrust chief Christine Varney is leaving the Justice Department early next month to join Cravath, Swaine & Moore, IBM’s pet outside law firm. There she’s supposed to specialize in antitrust issues related to mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal says Cravath almost never recruits partners from the outside. No successor has been named and the paper expects an interim replacement from inside the department to be named.
Without any hoopla or press releases, Intellectual Ventures (IV) quietly filed a second sweeping patent suit Monday charging Hynix Semiconductor and Elpida Memory, HP, Dell, Acer, Asustek – two of the largest memory chip makers in the world and a nice representative swat of the largest PC OEMs – with infringing five DDR2, DDR3 and GDDR4 memory patents in district court in Washington state. It also named Logitech, Kingston Technology, A-Data Technology, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Pantech in the suit. Naturally IV wants treble damages.
As well as deploying new applications to the cloud, many organizations will also be considering the opportunities to migrate current applications to the cloud in search of reduced costs or SLA improvements. In this research note we consider several migration alternatives, expressed as a set of patterns. The patterns can also be seen as a sequence of activities, through which the current application is gradually modernized.
Cisco, which has been having trouble moving its switches up against competition from HP and Juniper et al, updated the Catalyst 6500 Tuesday, its most popular product even, generator of some $42 billion in revenue the last 12 years with 700,000 installations out there somewhere, a seeming indication that it had gotten some focus back on its most important business. The widgetry promises to let users plug the upgrade into existing chasses. Meanwhile, HP claims market share gains in networking at Cisco’s expense. Cisco’s switching business was down 9% in the April quarter to $3.3 billion and, although it continues to dominate, it’s supposed to have lost five points of share in the 12 months between 1Q10 and 1Q11.
Heroku, Salesforce.com’s bought-in Rack-/Ruby-on-Rails-based Platform-as-a-Service, has hired Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto as its chief Ruby architect expecting he’ll make the language friendlier. Heroki couldn’t help point out that Ruby runs many of the world’s most popular brands like Comcast, Best Buy, AT&T’s Yellow pages, Hulu and Twitter. Heroku itself reportedly powers more than 150,000 apps written by Ruby developers.
If you are in IT, there is good chance that you are maintaining multiple B2B integration systems for data exchange and translation. Every IT leader has considered consolidating these products into a single B2B suite to reduce costs and improve supply chain agility. Historically, each B2B system has acted like a “black box,” providing little visibility and integration into the IT governance tools. This article outlines the benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA)-enabled approach to B2B and why it’s a better long-term strategy. As more and more companies adopt SOA and realize the importance of governance, it’s becoming critical to include the B2B suites into the SOA fabric and govern them as any other IT system. A well-thought-out SOA-based approach to B2B not only reduces the B2B expense but also provides SOA benefits such as improved governance, compliance, reuse and the ability to extend B2B processes to other IT applications.
Rumor has it that Oracle is soliciting Java royalties from Android device makers in case it wins its Android suit against Google and the price goes up. Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg says he heard from “various handset makers” that Oracle wants $15-$20 a device for Dalvik. He hasn’t heard of anybody signing up yet and the range sounds awfully like a first negotiating move. Microsoft, meanwhile, according to South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper, is supposedly trying to get $15 per Android device from Samsung, which would be triple the $5-a-device Microsoft is believed to be getting from HTC.
Judge William Alsup, who’s hearing the Oracle v Google suit over Android, has given the pair a terse one-paragraph order ahead of the Daubert hearing Google asked for next week to limit possible damages. “It appears,” he said, that it’s “possible that early on Google recognized that it would infringe patents protecting at least part of Java, entered into negotiations with Sun to obtain a license for use in Android, then abandoned the negotiations as too expensive, and pushed home with Android without any license at all.” He wants to know “How accurate is this scenario? Does Google acknowledge that Android infringes at least some of the claims if valid? If so, how should this affect the damages analysis? How should this affect the questions of willfulness and equitable relief? Counsel should be prepared to address these issues at the hearing” on July 21.
ADF's af:showDetailItem tag is used as a child to parent tags such as the af:panelAccordion and af:panelTabbed. JDeveloper's online documentation states the following about the af:showDetailItem tag: The showDetailItem component is used inside of a panelAccordion or panelTabbed component to contain a group of children. It is identified visually by the text attribute value and lays out its children. Note the difference between "disclosed" and "rendered": if "rendered" is false, it means that this the accordion header bar or tab link and its corresponding contents are not available at all to the user, whereas if "disclosed" is false, it means that the contents of the item are not currently visible, but may be made visible by the user since the accordion header bar or tab link are still visible. The lifecycle (including validation) is not run for any components in a showDetailItem which is not disclosed. The lifecycle is only run on the showDetailItem(s) which is disclosed.
The previous blog post in this series looked at the default behaviour of the ADF framework in 11.1.1.4.0 of the af:region tag embedded in a af:showDetailItem tag. In this post we'll look at programmatically controlling the activation of regions to stop unnecessary processing. This example will be simplified to only look at one af:region in the hidden second af:showDetailItem. Note the first af:showDetailItem is disclosed (open) and purely exists to act as the open af:showDetailItem with the second af:showDetailItem we're actually interested in is closed. Note the second af:showDetailItem has our embedded af:region calling CharlieTaskFlow.