Afraid the tablet will prove a durable and insurmountable market fixture – and simply wanting to sell more PCs – Intel says it’s shifting the “design center” of its mainstream laptop chips down to a mid-point of 15 watts from the current 35-40 watts, a mid-point that has let it fiddle with the widgets and optimize them according to destiny to run anywhere from an ultra-low 25 watts to a high-performance 100 watts, watts being such accommodating creatures. It calls this “reinventing the PC,” comparing it to the way it put multimedia support in Pentium and freed Centrino from the wall socket. And it’s meant a major overhaul of its roadmap. Intel’s dreaming of all its OEMs fielding elegant “instant-on” laptops that are anorexically thin, use solid state memory, deliver the Holy Grail of all-day battery life, respond to gestures, voice and touch, drag-and-drop files between devices without resorting to the cloud and carry mainstream or premium prices.
The OSGi framework is a popular platform for developing multifunctional desktop systems, enterprise systems and complex applications. OSGi uses a modular approach where each bundle is regarded as a relatively independent and separate unit. The framework controls maintenance-based tasks such as managing interactions between bundles, resolving dependencies, and managing lifecycles. Therefore, programmers can reallocate their time with less routine work and concentrate solely on solution development. However, testing such applications is a real problem. It is more demanding than regular Java application testing: there is a need to test interactions between the bundles, and the tests must occur within a real environment. In this case, the test must run inside the OSGi platform; thereby creating the need for specialized test frameworks.
(With apologies, apart of the beginning of this post has been chopped off during copy & paste. I'll rectify tonight) Yet as the old saying goes, "with power comes great responsibility", or alternatively, "the devil is in the detail". Developers need to have a good grasp of the task flow capabilities and options in order to not paint themselves into a corner. This is particularly true of the transaction and data control scope behavioural options provided by "bounded" task flows. The transaction and data control scope behavioural options available to bounded task flows provide a sophisticated set of functionality for spawning and managing one or more transactions during an ADF user's session.
Christophe Herreman, a Java developer from Belgium, made the following tweet today: “At the supermarket, and I once again seem to have picked the wrong lane... I wonder if there is a strategy for this.” Being a member of the Java community myself, I feel obligated to offer my approach to making this very important decision that every Java developer has to make on a weekly basis. First, I need to make a statement: out of all APIs I like Java Message Service (JMS) the most. IMO, JMS is the right way of architecting loosely coupled and reliable distributed applications. I explained this five years ago in the fifth article of my dissertation titled "Yakov’s Gas Station". BTW, last week, I joined a project at a financial company and was pleasantly surprised learning that the trading application was build using just JMS, JNDI, and JDBC without the use of any other frameworks.
Are you a webmaster or web developer? Want to create super-fast websites? You may have Monitis’s recent posts sharing tips for improving the performance of Windows Server 2008 and Linux Servers, and we hope that they’ve helped you. Now, we’re moving on to Javascript — that wonderful — but complicated — technology that enriches sites but can often get in the way of their efficient operation and slow down the user experience. And improving the user experience — whether it’s consumers or sysadmins — is our mission at Monitis. Why? Because it has been proven that optimal end-user experience improves site conversion rates, Google search rankings and web visitor satisfaction rates. What does that mean? Better business for you and your company!
Tilera, the many-core processor start-up, is drumming up business for its third-generation hydra-headed chips, expecting to have samples ready this summer, a tad late but, hey, nobody ever said this stuff was easy. The company’s 40nm Tile-Gx line is meant to be available with 16, 36, 64 and 100 64-bit RISC cores on a single die. Tilera segments the market, optimizing chips by where they’re bound. Marketing VP Troy Bailey says that “Networking applications need maximum throughput and lots of I/O in a dense form factor, while the cloud computing market wants the best performance-per-watt in order to save energy and cooling costs. And multimedia calls for a balance of high-performance signal processing and I/O. We have created three different processor series to accommodate these varying requirements.”
Beset by a flagging consumer business and the bottom falling out of the public sector on which it’s ever so dependent coupled with competitive pressures, market share losses and pricing challenges in its core business, industry bellwether Cisco, the overextended networking giant, said Wednesday that it’s going to lay people off. It claims it doesn’t know how many but it’s got considerable scope considering it’s got 73,408 employees. Estimates say it’ll probably work out to 4,000-5,000 terminations. The bomb dropped during Cisco’s conference call with Wall Street after the company posted a reasonably respectable fiscal third quarter but predicted that its numbers would tank this quarter, normally its strongest quarter.
Just in time for the upcoming Webinar with The BonTon Stores, where we talk about the challenges in operating complex WebSphere environments, we had another set of prospects running their applications on WebSphere. Francis Cordon, a colleague of mine, shares some of the screenshots resulting from these engagements. In this blog I want to highlight important areas when managing performance in WebSphere environments. This includes WebSphere Health Monitoring, End-to-End Performance Analysis, Performance and Business Impact Analysis as well as WebSphere Memory Analysis and Management. More details will be discussed during the Webinar on May 25th – so check it out if you are interested.
Last time I explained logical and organizational prerequisites to a successful production level application performance monitoring. I originally wanted to look at the concrete metrics we need on every tier, but was asked how you can correlate data in a distributed environment, so this will be the first thing that we look into. So let’s take a look at the technical prerequisites of successful production monitoring.
In the last week my task was to create stable functional tests for a new eCommerce application. We picked several use cases, e.g.: clicking through the different links, logging in, searching for products and actually buying a product. We needed functional tests that run on both Internet Explorer and Firefox. With these tests we want to make sure to automatically find any functional problems but also performance and architectural problems (e.g: too many JavaScript files on the site, too many exceptions on the server or too many database statements executed for a certain test scenario). We also want to find problems that happen on certain browsers – therefore the task of letting these tests run on the two major browsers.
Juniper Networks apparently didn’t find David Yen the keeper he was at Sun where he spent 20 years of his life because Kara Swisher of the All Things Digital blog thinks he was escorted out of company headquarters Monday morning and pointed in the direction of Cisco. She’s heard he’s going to run Cisco’s servers although she can’t get it confirmed. It’s clear from an internal Juniper memo she’s got dated Monday that he left Juniper “effective immediately….to return to his roots in servers.” Yen’s last job at Sun, which he left in 2008 before Oracle cast its long shadow, was running its Sparc chips and went to Juniper as head of emerging technologies and most recently fabric and switching technologies. He did run enterprise servers at Sun but that was a while back before he ran either Microelectronics or storage.
Red Hat is opening early access to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, which won’t be generally available until the beginning of next year. The application server is the runtime engine for the company’s Platform-as-a-Service widgetry. It’s also supposed to tickle the adoption of Java EE 6, which Red Hat suggests is now lighter weight, modular and productive than Java used to be. Red Hat’s middleware boss Craig Muzilla called Application Platform 6 a reflection of “our vision of the future of Java application platforms for both traditional and cloud-based environments.”
CA and VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company started by Cisco and EMC with money from VMware and Intel, have cut a global strategic alliance to deliver integrated private cloud solutions based on VCE’s Vblock Infrastructure Platforms. They said they’ll focus initially on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment and management, and migration of Tier 1, integral enterprise applications to the Vblock platform. The pair intends to certify a broad portfolio of CA’s service management, service assurance, service automation, virtualization management, capacity management, and security solutions for Vblock platforms.
Oracle has subpoenaed the Apache Foundation – which is squarely in the middle of the infringement suit Oracle has lodged against Google – demanding that it produce every shred of evidence it has about Google, Android, Java and the Open Handset Alliance. Oracle wants copies of all communications, electronic and otherwise, between Google and Apache about: The use or distribution of Apache Harmony source or object code in Android Any discussion of a license or other agreement, or about any IP issues or compensation or revenue relating to Android including all communications regarding Linux, Harmony, the GPL and the Apache Software License
When we get engaged with prospects that are interested in our performance management solution we walk them through a Proof of Concept. We let them install dynaTrace on their own prior to the actual POC. During the POC we ask them to exercise typical use cases on their application that show performance problems. We walk them through the different analysis options and add the findings to a final POC Presentation. In this blog I want to share some screenshots and findings of a typical Proof of Concept recently done in a heterogeneous .NET/Java Environment.
Highlighting an input field that failed validation (or conversation) is a common UI practice today. This sort of functionality is not available in JSF (nor RichFaces) out of the box (Seam does have it). I got an email from RichFaces 4 workshop attendee from CONFESS_2011 conference asking how to do it and I thought it’s a good idea to make it blog post. It turns out, implementing such functionality is pretty simple. All we need to do is check if a particular field (component) is valid and then render or not render a style for the input field.
Ah, the gloves are coming off. VMware, under the guise of a proprietary virtualization company, is inching up the software stack to horn in on Microsoft’s prized Office turf, a piece of ground well known to its CEO, ex-Microsoft nabob Paul Maritz. It’s bought SlideRocket, a five-year-old San Francisco SaaS-based business presentation ISV that leverages cloud computing, collaboration, social media and mobile computing platforms, giving it a practically perfect checklist score, especially if you throw in the fact that, in keeping with the custom of the day, it gives its entry-level widgetry away for free. This checklist paradigm claims more than 20,000 customers and 300,000 users, a base it’s built up since its software left beta in October of 2008. In that space of time it says its widgetry was used to produce 10 million presentations.
A New York federal jury got the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading case Monday around noon and so far no decision. It did ask for a bunch of the government wiretaps to be replayed on Tuesday and Wednesday and it’s supposed to deliberate for a few hours on Friday, then resume again Monday full-time if it hasn’t reached a verdict yet. The judge denied the jury transcripts of the recorded conversations and witness testimony. The replayed taps included calls between Rajaratnam and former Intel executive Rajiv Goel and former McKinsey consultant Anil Kumar. Both men testified against him at the trial after pleading guilty themselves in the case. The Goel tap revolved around an Intel-backed Clearwire-Sprint Nextel venture and the Kumar tap about the Abu Dhabi investment in AMD.
BEA co-founder Alfred Chuang, who was running the joint when Oracle swooped in and bought it three years ago for $8.5 billion, has raised a $12.6 million A round led by Andreessen Horowitz for a new start-up called Magnet Systems. Magnet’s got a cloud-ified development platform called WIN, short for Workplace Interaction Network, that’s supposed to be used to build and deploy so-called enterprise social applications that work on Amazon and let business people connect and collaborate the way the hoi polloi does on Facebook and Twitter, automatically linking up existing social networking connections.
Lawson Software suckered the punters who had bid its stock up over 13 bucks a share in the last six weeks in anticipation of a bidding war or a sweetener after privately held Infor – now run by former Oracle president Chuck Phillips – put $11.25 a share on the table late at night the Friday the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. This Tuesday Lawson accepted Infor’s original $1.84 billion offer, forcing gamblers to dump their positions. Lawson said in the announcement that it had “contacted other potential acquirers including competing global providers of enterprise applications and financial buyers, a process that did not result in a superior proposal.”
Android cultists might want to get out their worry beads because, according to Reuters, the judge who’s going to preside over the Oracle v Google patent infringement suit later this year over Google’s use of Java in Android has sided with Oracle’s interpretation of what a bunch of technical terms are supposed to mean. It’s only a tentative ruling – objections will be entertained next month – but as the wire service points out, “Claim construction orders define the scope of a party’s patent rights, and thus can often shape the course of the litigation.” The judge bought the way Oracle construed four of the terms and wrote his own construction of the fifth.
This article attempts to serve as checklist and is designed for clients and professional community that use or are considering to use WebSphere eXtreme Scale as a elastic, scalable in memory data cache, and who are interested in implementing a highly available and scalable e-business infrastructure using the IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale (WXS). Through WebSphere eXtreme Scale, customers can postpone or virtually eliminate costs associated with upgrading more expensive, heavily loaded back-end database and transactional systems, while meeting the high availability and scalability requirements for today’s environments. While not an exhaustive list, this paper includes primarily the infrastructure planning requirements of WXS environment.
Passing a technical job interview is a challenge to most of the Java developers. Some people simply fail because they are not well prepared and questions like “What’s the difference between abstract classes interfaces?” puts them into a comatose state. In such cases Mr. President won't help. But there is a large group of people who know the difference between abstract classes and interfaces, but still feel stressed and intimidated and can’t properly explain it to give the interviewer the confidence he’s looking for. The interviewer has only one thing in mind, “Can I trust a developer’s role on our project to this job applicant? ” There are people who always pass any interview with flying colors regardless of whether or not they know the difference between abstract classes and interfaces. And this is where you have to learn from President Obama, who is one of these guys.
Cloud computing is changing the rules of the game for many industries. Every day we hear compelling stories about how banks use cloud-based solutions to help customers pay bills online, health care institutions tap cloud networks to collaborate on medical care, and colleges leverage technology to create virtual classrooms. Cloud computing hasn’t had a huge effect on business commerce. Despite billions spent on technologies to streamline the process, business commerce has been remarkably resilient to technological progress. Commerce collaboration between companies is still weighed down by paper-based processes and outmoded operating infrastructures. In fact, more than 80 percent of business-to-business commerce transactions are completed manually, and companies still send 85 percent of invoices and payments on paper.
PacketMotion, which does what they call User Activity Management (UAM), has got a PacketSentry Virtual Probe that extends its physical security to virtual and cloud environments. And what that means is it’s supposed to give the security and network teams responsible for meeting compliance regulations and protecting IP a solution for auditing and enforcing policies in a virtual data center, an area typically owned by server teams. The widgetry’s an appliance and it’s supposed to monitor and secure access to sensitive data in VMware clusters by delivering its application and identity-aware solution as a guest VM without the administrator needing to know IP addresses. It can, for instance, monitor databases, fileshares and web applications.